Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “Dissatisfaction began to grow so great in Parker that there was no containing it outside of a tattoo. It had to be his back. There was no help for it. A dim half-formed inspiration began to work in his mind. He visualized having a tattoo put there that Sarah Ruth would not be able to resist – a religious subject.”

— Flannery O'Connor

354. “The past and the future were the same thing to him, one forgotten and the other not remembered; he had no more notion of dying than a cat. Every year on Confederate Memorial Day, he was bundled up and lent to the Capitol City Museum where he was displayed from one to four in a musty room full of old photographs, old uniforms, old artillery, and historic documents.”

— Flannery O'Connor

355. “Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle 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. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs.”

— Flannery O'Connor

356. “The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them.”

— Flannery O'Connor

357. “The misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with Jesus.”

— Flannery O'Connor

358. “True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind.”

— Flannery O'Connor

359. “Two things I can’t stand,” Haze said, “ – a man that ain’t true and one that mocks what is.”

— Flannery O'Connor

360. “The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.”

— Flannery O'Connor

361. “In any case, you can’t have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can’t indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.”

— Flannery O'Connor

362. “It’s just like any other city and cities ain’t all that complicated.” But they were. New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next.”

— Flannery O'Connor

363. “Flannery revealed she had been working on the novel “a year and a half and will probably be two more years finishing it.” She described her writing habits in a letter dated July 13: “I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

364. “He was four or five.”

— Flannery O'Connor

365. “He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again.”

— Flannery O'Connor

366. “She was seeing that her father spent his last years with his own family and not in a decayed boarding house full of old women whose heads jiggled. She was doing her duty. She had brothers and sisters who were not.”

— Flannery O'Connor

367. “At his desk, pen in hand, none was more articulate than Thomas. As soon as he found himself shut into the car with Sarah Ham, terror seized his tongue.”

— Flannery O'Connor

368. “It’s no part of your job to think for the Lord,” his great-uncle said. “Judgment may rack your bones.”

— Flannery O'Connor

369. “Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual.”

— Flannery O'Connor

370. “The daughter sat down too and watched him with a cautious sly look as if he were a bird that had come up very close.”

— Flannery O'Connor

371. “The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don’t hold nothing back.”

— Flannery O'Connor

372. “Mr. Shiftlet said that the trouble with the world was that nobody cared, or stopped and took any trouble.”

— Flannery O'Connor

373. “Mr. Head turned slowly. 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.”

— Flannery O'Connor

374. “He don’t know it’s anything he can’t know,” the old man said. “That’s his trouble. He thinks if it’s something he can’t know then somebody smarter than him can tell him about it and he can know it just the same. And if you were to go there, the first thing he would do would be to test your head and tell you what you were thinking and howcome you were thinking it and what you ought to be thinking instead. And before long you wouldn’t belong to your self no more, you would belong to him.”

— Flannery O'Connor

375. “You found out more when you left where you lived. He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ.”

— Flannery O'Connor

376. “He wondered if she walked at night and came there ever – came with that look on her face, unrested and looking, going up the path and through the barn open all around and stopping in the shadow by the store boarded up, coming on unrested with that look on her face like he had seen through the crack going down.”

— Flannery O'Connor

377. “We’re all damned,” she said, “but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.”

— Flannery O'Connor

378. “Only art could make fiction beautiful; only reality could sustain such intense art.”

— Flannery O'Connor

379. “He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades.”

— Flannery O'Connor

380. “Librarians are the last people you can trust about the inside of books.”

— Flannery O'Connor

381. “FLANNERY O’CONNOR Wise Blood.”

— Flannery O'Connor

382. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”

— Flannery O'Connor

383. “His thoughts were heavy as if they had to struggle up through some dense medium to reach the surface of his mind.”

— Flannery O'Connor