Flannery O'Connor Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.

Flannery O'Connor
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

Flannery O'Connor
The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

Flannery O'Connor
I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.

Flannery O'Connor
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.

Flannery O'Connor
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Flannery O'Connor
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

Flannery O'Connor
When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.

Flannery O'Connor
I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.

Flannery O'Connor
That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.

Flannery O'Connor
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

Flannery O'Connor
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

Flannery O'Connor
The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.

Flannery O'Connor
Time is very dangerous without a rigid routine. If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.

Flannery O'Connor
A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.

Flannery O'Connor
What I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.

Flannery O'Connor
The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.

Flannery O'Connor
The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

Flannery O'Connor
The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.... If you manage to use it successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you make it art first.

Flannery O'Connor
All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Flannery O'Connor
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
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
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