Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The meaning of the story is the story.”

— Flannery O'Connor

202. “Who’s there?” the voice from inside said and there was a quality about it now that seemed final. The knob rattled and the voice said peremptorily, “Who’s there, I ast you?” Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed keyhole. “Obadiah,” he whispered and all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts.”

— Flannery O'Connor

203. “Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.”

— Flannery O'Connor

204. “Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.”

— Flannery O'Connor

205. “In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn’t stifle them enough.”

— Flannery O'Connor

206. “You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you make live.”

— Flannery O'Connor

207. “I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.”

— Flannery O'Connor

208. “Poorly written novels – no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters – are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.”

— Flannery O'Connor

209. “If we forget our past,” the speaker was saying, “we won’t remember our future and it will be as well for we won’t have one.” The General heard some of these words gradually. He had forgotten history and he didn’t intend to remember it again. He had forgotten the name and face of his wife and the names and faces of his children or even if he had a wife and children, and he had forgotten the names of places and the places themselves and what had happened at them.”

— Flannery O'Connor

210. “You can’t just say NO,” he said. “You got to do NO. You got to show it. You got to show you mean it by doing it. You got to show you’re not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to make an end of it. One way or another.”

— Flannery O'Connor

211. “If I had to live in a city I think I would prefer New Orleans to any other – both Southern and Catholic and with indications that the Devil’s existence is freely recognized.”

— Flannery O'Connor

212. “We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.”

— Flannery O'Connor

213. “Christianity is a strangely cheery religion.”

— Flannery O'Connor

214. “The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.”

— Flannery O'Connor

215. “I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.”

— Flannery O'Connor

216. “I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.”

— Flannery O'Connor

217. “If they here, they somewhere.”

— Flannery O'Connor

218. “I have tried imagining that the single peacock I see before me is the only one I have, but then one comes to join him, another flies off the roof, four or five crash out of the crepe-myrtle hedge; from the pond one screams and from the barn I hear the dairyman denouncing another that has got into the cow-feed. My kin are given to such phrases as, ‘Let’s face it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

219. “Anyone who has lived to the age of eighteen has enough stories to last a lifetime.”

— Flannery O'Connor

220. “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.”

— Flannery O'Connor

221. “I’m always highly 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

222. “Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.”

— Flannery O'Connor

223. “There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.”

— Flannery O'Connor

224. “When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.”

— Flannery O'Connor

225. “I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I’m afraid it will not be controversial.”

— Flannery O'Connor

226. “The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.”

— Flannery O'Connor

227. “Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.”

— Flannery O'Connor

228. “There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion.”

— Flannery O'Connor

229. “I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.”

— Flannery O'Connor

230. “Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.”

— Flannery O'Connor

231. “He had learned enough to hate the destruction that had to come and not all that was going to be destroyed.”

— Flannery O'Connor

232. “I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can’t operate at all, of course, except on believable material.”

— Flannery O'Connor

233. “I believe firmly in mystery and manners.”

— Flannery O'Connor

234. “After a while he said, “If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.”

— Flannery O'Connor

235. “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

— Flannery O'Connor

236. “It is when the individual’s faith is weak, not strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost.”

— Flannery O'Connor

237. “You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else,” he said, “but you ain’t! I’m the one has it. Not you. Me.” Haze didn’t say anything. He stood there for an instant, small in the.”

— Flannery O'Connor

238. “You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.”

— Flannery O'Connor

239. “I am going to be the World Authority on Peafowl, and I hope to be offered a chair some day at the Chicken College.”

— Flannery O'Connor

240. “From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.”

— Flannery O'Connor

241. “In most good stories it is the character’s personalty that creates the action of the story.”

— Flannery O'Connor

242. “He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.”

— Flannery O'Connor

243. “Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children.”

— Flannery O'Connor

244. “Remember that you don’t write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”

— Flannery O'Connor

245. “I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.”

— Flannery O'Connor

246. “A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.”

— Flannery O'Connor

247. “To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.”

— Flannery O'Connor

248. “It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.”

— Flannery O'Connor

249. “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”

— Flannery O'Connor

250. “There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.”

— Flannery O'Connor