Flannery O'Connor Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

Flannery O'Connor
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only.

Flannery O'Connor
The writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.

Flannery O'Connor
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't write fiction. It isn't grand enough for you.

Flannery O'Connor
Many times I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing: if an idea does come between nine and twelve, I am there ready for it.

Flannery O'Connor
I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

Flannery O'Connor
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

Flannery O'Connor
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

Flannery O'Connor
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Flannery O'Connor
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.

Flannery O'Connor
Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

Flannery O'Connor
There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

Flannery O'Connor
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

Flannery O'Connor
Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it."

Flannery O'Connor
The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

Flannery O'Connor
Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

Flannery O'Connor
It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.

Flannery O'Connor
He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

Flannery O'Connor
Besides the neutral expression she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck.

Flannery O'Connor
The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.

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