Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “He was singing a hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn.”

— Flannery O'Connor

253. “We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. That is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do.”

— Flannery O'Connor

254. “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

255. “We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.”

— Flannery O'Connor

256. “The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”

— Flannery O'Connor

257. “With grown people, a road led either to heaven or hell, but with children there were always stops along the way where their attention could be turned with a trifle.”

— Flannery O'Connor

258. “Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”

— Flannery O'Connor

259. “As was usual with him, he began with the least important thing and worked around and in toward the center where the meaning was.”

— Flannery O'Connor

260. “He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

262. “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

263. “Unfortunately, to try to disconnect faith from vision is to do violence to the whole personality, and the whole personality participates in the act of writing. The tensions of being a Catholic novelist are probably never balanced for the writer until the Church becomes so much a part of his personality that he can forget about her – in the same sense that when he writes, he forgets about himself.”

— Flannery O'Connor

264. “The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.”

— Flannery O'Connor

265. “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

266. “Give me the grace to be impatient for the time when I shall see You face to face and need no stimulus than that to adore You.”

— Flannery O'Connor

267. “Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn’t actually experience, who isn’t made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.”

— Flannery O'Connor

268. “I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened.”

— Flannery O'Connor

269. “My heroine already is, and is Hulga.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

271. “It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.”

— Flannery O'Connor

272. “And as for that strangeness in your gut, that comes from you, not the Lord. When you were a child you had worms. As likely as not you have them again.”

— Flannery O'Connor

273. “I sure am sick of the Civil War.”

— Flannery O'Connor

274. “I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.”

— Flannery O'Connor

275. “I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.”

— Flannery O'Connor

276. “Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.”

— Flannery O'Connor

277. “How would he know if time was going backwards or forwards or if he was going with it?”

— Flannery O'Connor

278. “Parker had an extra sense that told him when there was a woman nearby watching him.”

— Flannery O'Connor

279. “It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.”

— Flannery O'Connor

280. “The Bible was the only book he read. He didn’t read it often but when he did he wore his mother’s glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.”

— Flannery O'Connor

281. “Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”

— Flannery O'Connor

282. “When he was four years old, his father had brought him home a tin box from the penitentiary. It was orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle on the outside of it and green letters that said, “A NUTTY SURPRISE!” When Enoch had opened it, a coiled piece of steel had sprung out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth. His life was full of so many happenings like that that it would seem he should have been more sensitive to his times of danger.”

— Flannery O'Connor

283. “I came from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation.”

— Flannery O'Connor

284. “Do you think, Mr. Motes,” she said hoarsely, “that when you’re dead, you’re blind?” “I hope so,” he said after a minute. “Why?” she asked, staring at him. After a while he said, “If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.” The.”

— Flannery O'Connor

285. “I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

286. “I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

287. “What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”

— Flannery O'Connor

288. “Any criticism at all which depresses you to the extent that you feel you cannot ever write anything worth anything is from the Devil and to subject yourself to it is for you an occasion of sin. In you the talent is there and you are expected to use it. Whether the work itself is completely successful, or whether you ever get any worldly success out of it, is a matter of no concern to you. It is like the Japanese swordsmen who are indifferent to getting slain in the duel.”

— Flannery O'Connor

289. “Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn’t stifle enough of them.”

— Flannery O'Connor

290. “There were two round photographs of an old man and woman with collapsed mouths and another picture of a man whose eyebrows dashed out of two bushes of hair and clashed in a heap on the bridge of his nose; the rest of his face stuck out like a bare cliff to fall from.”

— Flannery O'Connor

291. “The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.”

— Flannery O'Connor

292. “I am the menial, at the beck and squawk of any feathered worthy who wants service.”

— Flannery O'Connor

293. “She didn’t like to admit it about her own kin, least about her own brother, but there he was – good for absolutely nothing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

294. “You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don’t, probably nobody else will.”

— Flannery O'Connor

295. “The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.”

— Flannery O'Connor

296. “You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.”

— Flannery O'Connor

297. “Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know.”

— Flannery O'Connor

298. “The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems of the spirit.”

— Flannery O'Connor

299. “There a series of Catholic rituals and teachings had offered her young life a coherent universe. By 1946, Savannah had for O’Connor ceded to the university world of Iowa, where new influences, including intellectual joys, brought with them questions and skepticism.”

— Flannery O'Connor

300. “Early in 1955 Flannery completed work on her second book, a collection of these stories which she entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find. In January we sent it to press, having set publication for June. I remember our amusement at Evelyn Waugh’s reaction to the advance proofs we sent him: “If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable.”

— Flannery O'Connor