Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

— Flannery O'Connor

102. “Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.”

— Flannery O'Connor

103. “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

— Flannery O'Connor

104. “Nothing is like it used to be, lady,” he said. “The world is almost rotten.”

— Flannery O'Connor

105. “When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.”

— Flannery O'Connor

106. “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

— Flannery O'Connor

107. “I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate. She said she reckoned they said, “The lame shall enter first.” This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches.”

— Flannery O'Connor

108. “I call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”

— Flannery O'Connor

109. “I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

110. “Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.”

— Flannery O'Connor

111. “The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.”

— Flannery O'Connor

112. “Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.”

— Flannery O'Connor

113. “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

— Flannery O'Connor

114. “There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”

— Flannery O'Connor

115. “No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist.”

— Flannery O'Connor

116. “Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.”

— Flannery O'Connor

117. “She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody to shoot her every day of her life.”

— Flannery O'Connor

118. “One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.”

— Flannery O'Connor

119. “I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding...”

— Flannery O'Connor

120. “The trouble with the world was that nobody stopped or took any care.”

— Flannery O'Connor

121. “Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.”

— Flannery O'Connor

122. “The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.”

— Flannery O'Connor

123. “I don’t want to be doomed to mediocrity in my feeling for Christ. I want to feel. I want to love. Take me, dear Lord, and set me in the direction I am to go.”

— Flannery O'Connor

124. “Its face was like the face she had seen in some medieval paintings where the martyr’s limbs are being sawed off and his expression says he is being deprived of nothing essential.”

— Flannery O'Connor

125. “So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.”

— Flannery O'Connor

126. “True culture is in the mind, the mind,” he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.” “It’s in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are.” “Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are.” “I care who I am,” she said icily.”

— Flannery O'Connor

127. “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

— Flannery O'Connor

128. “The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”

— Flannery O'Connor

129. “She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

130. “The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.”

— Flannery O'Connor

131. “Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.”

— Flannery O'Connor

132. “When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.”

— Flannery O'Connor

133. “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

— Flannery O'Connor

134. “When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.”

— Flannery O'Connor

135. “I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord. Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

136. “Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

137. “Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.”

— Flannery O'Connor

138. “The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.”

— Flannery O'Connor

139. “The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”

— Flannery O'Connor

140. “The dead don’t bother with particulars.”

— Flannery O'Connor

141. “Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you’re not a lady? she says.”

— Flannery O'Connor

142. “It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

143. “I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.”

— Flannery O'Connor

144. “The trouble with you is,” she said, “you sit in front of that window all the time where there’s nothing to look out at. You need some inspiration and an out-let. If you would let me pull your chair around to look at the TV, you would quit thinking about morbid stuff, death and hell and judgement. My Lord.”

— Flannery O'Connor

145. “Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.”

— Flannery O'Connor

146. “At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”

— Flannery O'Connor

147. “As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head.”

— Flannery O'Connor

148. “Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look.”

— Flannery O'Connor

149. “She would have been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

— Flannery O'Connor

150. “She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”

— Flannery O'Connor