Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The air was so quiet he could hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking in the water.”

— Flannery O'Connor

152. “People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them.”

— Flannery O'Connor

153. “And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said – without warning “Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!”

— Flannery O'Connor

154. “The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”

— Flannery O'Connor

155. “The old woman’s three mountains were black against the dark blue sky and were visited off and on by various planets and by the moon after it had left the chickens.”

— Flannery O'Connor

156. “The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”

— Flannery O'Connor

157. “When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

159. “It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them – in which case, if you don’t watch out, they cease to be adversaries.”

— Flannery O'Connor

160. “A cloud, the exact color of the boy’s hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him.”

— Flannery O'Connor

161. “Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don’t know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don’t suppose I would write the story.”

— Flannery O'Connor

162. “I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.”

— Flannery O'Connor

163. “A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.”

— Flannery O'Connor

164. “Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.”

— Flannery O'Connor

165. “It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.”

— Flannery O'Connor

166. “He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.”

— Flannery O'Connor

167. “I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from, and no Redemption because there was no Fall, and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”

— Flannery O'Connor

168. “Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

169. “He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.”

— Flannery O'Connor

170. “The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain.”

— Flannery O'Connor

171. “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

172. “People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.”

— Flannery O'Connor

173. “Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.”

— Flannery O'Connor

174. “The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.”

— Flannery O'Connor

175. “Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

177. “He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, ‘I ain’t got any tattoo on my back.’ ‘What you got on it?’ the girl said. ‘My shirt,’ Parker said. ‘Haw.’ ‘Haw, haw,’ the girl said politely.”

— Flannery O'Connor

178. “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

179. “Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren’t is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.”

— Flannery O'Connor

180. “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

181. “I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity – what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.”

— Flannery O'Connor

182. “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

183. “Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.”

— Flannery O'Connor

184. “The fact is that if the writer’s attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole.”

— Flannery O'Connor

185. “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

186. “There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.”

— Flannery O'Connor

187. “When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he’s going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.”

— Flannery O'Connor

188. “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”

— Flannery O'Connor

189. “Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.”

— Flannery O'Connor

190. “I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.”

— Flannery O'Connor

191. “Across the river there was a low red and gold grove of sassafras with hills of dark blue trees behind it and an occasional pine jutting over the skyline. Behind, in the distance, the city rose like a cluster of warts on the side of the mountain. The birds revolved downward and dropped lightly in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if they were supporting the sky.”

— Flannery O'Connor

192. “Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.”

— Flannery O'Connor

193. “Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.”

— Flannery O'Connor

194. “Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.”

— Flannery O'Connor

195. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

197. “He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled into it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station.”

— Flannery O'Connor

198. “I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

199. “Sin is a great thing as long as it’s recognized. It leads a good many people to God who wouldn’t get there otherwise.”

— Flannery O'Connor

200. “Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.”

— Flannery O'Connor