Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Having been a Protestant, you may have the feeling that you must feel you believe; perhaps feeling belief is not always an illusion but I imagine it is most of the time; but I can understand the feeling of pain on going to Communion and it seems a more reliable feeling than joy. Do you know the Hopkins-Bridges correspondence? Bridges wrote Hopkins at one point and asked him how he could possibly learn to believe, expecting, I suppose, a metaphysical answer. Hopkins only said, “Give alms.”

— Flannery O'Connor

303. “I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”

— Flannery O'Connor

304. “The writer who position is Christian, and probably also the writer whose position is not, will begin to wonder at this point if there could not be some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joy of life. He may at least be permitted to ask if these screams for joy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperous society.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

307. “The formality that is left in the South now is quite dead and done for of course.”

— Flannery O'Connor

308. “The thing for you to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well.”

— Flannery O'Connor

309. “The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.”

— Flannery O'Connor

310. “It was not right to believe anything you couldn’t see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.”

— Flannery O'Connor

311. “I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I’m sure of it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

312. “Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.”

— Flannery O'Connor

313. “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”

— Flannery O'Connor

314. “Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.”

— Flannery O'Connor

315. “I watch the stock-car races sometimes but you don’t see anything but cars. I know about Fireball Roberts though and I watched an interview with Tiny Lunn. He is a huge dead-serious innocent-faced boy who must have made it big, he had just won the one in Jacksonville when I saw him but he never smiled once.”

— Flannery O'Connor

316. “There is nothing like being pleased with your own work – and this is the best stage – before it is published and begins to be misunderstood.”

— Flannery O'Connor

317. “Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn’t mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.”

— Flannery O'Connor

318. “The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible.”

— Flannery O'Connor

319. “He was bald-headed except for a little fringe of rust-colored hair and his face was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like them with ruts and gullys.”

— Flannery O'Connor

320. “The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art.”

— Flannery O'Connor

321. “The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable.”

— Flannery O'Connor

322. “The Liberal approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own efforts. Therefore, evil in this light is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all mysteries will eventually be cleared up.”

— Flannery O'Connor

323. “In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel’s worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”

— Flannery O'Connor

324. “There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

325. “In the name of social order, liberal thought, and sometimes even Christianity, the novelist is asked to be the handmaid of his age.”

— Flannery O'Connor

326. “I like his eyes,” she observed, “They don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep on looking.”

— Flannery O'Connor

327. “He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do.”

— Flannery O'Connor

328. “In spite of himself, Enoch couldn’t get over the expectation that the new jesus was going to do something for him in return for his services. This was the virtue of Hope, which was made up, in Enoch, of two parts suspicion and one part lust.”

— Flannery O'Connor

329. “All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”

— Flannery O'Connor

330. “His home was to him home, workshop, church, as personal as the shell of a turtle and as necessary.”

— Flannery O'Connor

331. “Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.”

— Flannery O'Connor

332. “His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.”

— Flannery O'Connor

333. “If I even do get to be a fine writer it will not be because I am a fine writer, but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.”

— Flannery O'Connor

334. “Lemme tell you something: there ain’t any place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man.” The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet’s head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree. He didn’t answer at once. He rolled himself.”

— Flannery O'Connor

335. “Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance that extended from his eyes to blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space.”

— Flannery O'Connor

336. “I am not a warthog from hell.”

— Flannery O'Connor

337. “A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens. He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do.”

— Flannery O'Connor

338. “My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘You know,’ Daddy said, ’it’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!”

— Flannery O'Connor

339. “Every time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley’s imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil’s experiment station.”

— Flannery O'Connor

340. “Turn to the right, it was a wall,” The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. “Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come.”

— Flannery O'Connor

341. “My dear God, I am impressed with how much I have to be thankful for in a material sense; and in a spiritual sense I have the opportunity of being even more fortunate. But it seems apparent to me that I am not translating this opportunity into fact.”

— Flannery O'Connor

342. “Flannery O’Connor considered herself “a very innocent speller.” Spelling has therefore been corrected in this transcription of A Prayer Journal, so that the reader is not distracted.”

— Flannery O'Connor

343. “I come a long way since I would believe anything. I come halfway around the world.”

— Flannery O'Connor

344. “He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation. He didn’t care if he never made the train and if it had not been for what suddenly caught his attention, like a cry out of the gathering dusk, he might have forgotten there was a station to go to.”

— Flannery O'Connor

345. “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

346. “Eastrod filled his head and then went out beyond and filled the space that stretched from the train across the empty darkening fields.”

— Flannery O'Connor

347. “She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten. Were it not that she was a widow who had struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who was supporting him still, “until he got on his feet,” she might have been a little girl that he had to take to town.”

— Flannery O'Connor

348. “Fiction may deal with faith implicitly but explicitly it deals only with faith-in-a-person, or persons. What must be unquestionable is what is implicitly implied as the author’s attitude, and to do this the writer has to succeed in making the divinity of Christ seem consistent with the structure of all reality. This has to be got across implicitly in spite of a world that doesn’t feel it, in spite of characters who don’t live it. – Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being.”

— Flannery O'Connor

349. “The misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with Jesus. When the army finally let him go, he was pleased to think that he was still uncorrupted. All he wanted was to get back to Eastrod, Tennessee. The black Bible and his mother’s glasses were still in the bottom of his duffel bag. He didn’t read any book now but he kept the Bible because it had come from home. He kept the glasses in case his vision should ever become dim.”

— Flannery O'Connor

350. “He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn’t kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up. He stepped down and greeted her.”

— Flannery O'Connor