Flannery O'Connor Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

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
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
I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from, and no Redemption because there was no Fall, and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.

Flannery O'Connor
You have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

Flannery O'Connor
The man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.

Flannery O'Connor
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.

Flannery O'Connor
My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.

Flannery O'Connor
Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!

Flannery O'Connor
The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.

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

Flannery O'Connor
We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.

Flannery O'Connor
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.

Flannery O'Connor
The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.

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

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

Flannery O'Connor
I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.

Flannery O'Connor
Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Flannery O'Connor