Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.”

— Flannery O'Connor

104. “The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

105. “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

106. “Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.”

— Flannery O'Connor

107. “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

108. “You remain what you are. – Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

— Flannery O'Connor

109. “I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.”

— Flannery O'Connor

110. “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

111. “Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

113. “Lady,′ The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the wood, ’there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.”

— Flannery O'Connor

114. “The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.”

— Flannery O'Connor

115. “Tennessee’s a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia’s a lousy state too.”

— Flannery O'Connor

116. “If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.”

— Flannery O'Connor

117. “It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.”

— Flannery O'Connor

118. “There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

— Flannery O'Connor

119. “She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.”

— Flannery O'Connor

120. “A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”

— Flannery O'Connor

121. “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

— Flannery O'Connor

122. “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

123. “I’m a member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

129. “Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.”

— Flannery O'Connor

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

133. “The nearness I mean comes after death perhaps. It is what we are struggling for and if I found it either I would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be intolerable.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

135. “Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.”

— Flannery O'Connor

136. “He kept on digging but the grave did not get any deeper. “The dead are poor,” he said in the voice of the stranger. You can’t be any poorer than dead.”

— Flannery O'Connor

137. “Unadaptability is often a virtue.”

— Flannery O'Connor

138. “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

139. “My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

146. “Success means being heard and don’t stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.”

— Flannery O'Connor

147. “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

148. “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

149. “This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.”

— Flannery O'Connor

150. “No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.”

— Flannery O'Connor