Flannery O'Connor Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility...

Flannery O'Connor
A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

Flannery O'Connor
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint...

Flannery O'Connor
She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.

Flannery O'Connor
When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.

Flannery O'Connor
I am also five three and in the neighborhood of one thirty. It is a neighborhood I would like to get out of.

Flannery O'Connor
Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

Flannery O'Connor
If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.

Flannery O'Connor
No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

Flannery O'Connor
Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama.... Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

Flannery O'Connor
The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

Flannery O'Connor
If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

Flannery O'Connor
She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." "Some fun!" Bobby Lee said. "Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life.

Flannery O'Connor
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.

Flannery O'Connor
I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity — what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

Flannery O'Connor
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.

Flannery O'Connor
I certainly am glad you like the stories because now I feel it's not bad that I like them so much. The truth is I like them better than anybody and I read them over and over and laugh and laugh, then get embarrassed when I remember I was the one wrote them.

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

Flannery O'Connor
I preach that there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

Flannery O'Connor
Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.

Flannery O'Connor
She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

Flannery O'Connor
The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.

Flannery O'Connor
I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

Flannery O'Connor
There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

Flannery O'Connor
I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.

Flannery O'Connor
I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.

Flannery O'Connor
I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

Flannery O'Connor
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

Flannery O'Connor
It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them — in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.

Flannery O'Connor
I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

Flannery O'Connor