Home > Author > Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor QUOTES

Flannery O'Connor QUOTES

1 " He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery... "

― Flannery O'Connor , Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

2 " 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 , Wise Blood

3 " Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better. "

― Flannery O'Connor

4 " Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. "

― Flannery O'Connor

5 " I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it. "

― Flannery O'Connor , The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

6 " Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. "

― Flannery O'Connor , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

7 " Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me. "

― Flannery O'Connor , The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

8 " If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now. "

― Flannery O'Connor

9 " 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

10 " You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd. "

― Flannery O'Connor ,

11 " 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 , Wise Blood

12 " The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth. "

― Flannery O'Connor

13 " When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost. "

― Flannery O'Connor , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

14 " The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”
(August 9, 1955) "

― Flannery O'Connor

15 " People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. "

― Flannery O'Connor

16 " 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 , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

17 " Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always 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 , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

18 " There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence. "

― Flannery O'Connor , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

19 " Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you. "

― Flannery O'Connor

20 " Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them. "

― Flannery O'Connor , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose