Flannery O'Connor Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

Flannery O'Connor
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

Flannery O'Connor
It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.

Flannery O'Connor
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
I believe the teacher's work is largely negative, that it is largely a matter of saying, "This doesn't work because..." or "This does work because..." The because is very important. The teacher can help you understand the nature of your medium, and he can guide you in your reading.

Flannery O'Connor
I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing... If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

Flannery O'Connor
I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.

Flannery O'Connor
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

Flannery O'Connor
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.

Flannery O'Connor
A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

Flannery O'Connor
Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.

Flannery O'Connor
Enoch never nagged his blood to tell him a thing until it was ready.

Flannery O'Connor
Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

Flannery O'Connor
The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

Flannery O'Connor
It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

Flannery O'Connor
She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, through she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

Flannery O'Connor
Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.

Flannery O'Connor
Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.

Flannery O'Connor
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
I don't want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—​for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.

Flannery O'Connor
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

Flannery O'Connor
The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.

Flannery O'Connor
Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception operate.

Flannery O'Connor
Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

Flannery O'Connor
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
Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Flannery O'Connor
In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite

Flannery O'Connor
If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.

Flannery O'Connor
If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.

Flannery O'Connor
Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.

Flannery O'Connor