Flannery O'Connor Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Down And, Hunts, Ifs

  Flannery O'Connor (2015). “Wise Blood”, p.92, Faber & Faber

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Levels, Absolutes, Relative

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.178, Macmillan

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Fall, Writing, Stories

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.48, Macmillan

  14 Copy quote

• The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Looks, Fiction, Garbage

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.630, Macmillan

  104 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Southern, Able

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.44, Macmillan

  106 Copy quote

• The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Teacher, Writing, School

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.140, Macmillan

  74 Copy quote

• There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech

  Flannery O'Connor

  Two, Southern, Quality

  96 Copy quote

• 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

  Ocean, Fall, Thinking

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “Collected Works”, New York, NY : Library of America : Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press

  62 Copy quote

• I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

  Flannery O'Connor

  People, Dumb, Needs

  57 Copy quote

• Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Nuts, Piano

  14 Copy quote

• Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Faith, Selfish, Order

  65 Copy quote

• 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

  Christian, Spiritual, Mean

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.32, Macmillan

  37 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Europe, Long

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.163, Macmillan

  21 Copy quote

• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Education, Teacher, Women

  Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose "The Nature and Aims of Fiction" (1969)

  13 Copy quote

• Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Experience, Conviction, Harshness

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.97, Macmillan

  36 Copy quote

• I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Eye, Blessing, I Can

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.57, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. 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 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Morning, Ideas, Doe

  8 Copy quote

• One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Christian, Believe, Writing

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.92, Macmillan

  22 Copy quote

• The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Dark, Night, Long

  11 Copy quote

• Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Real, Reflection, Expression

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Use, Lord

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “Collected Works”, New York, NY : Library of America : Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press

  10 Copy quote

• ...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Believe, Struggle, Suffering

  12 Copy quote

• People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Long, People

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.78, Macmillan

  39 Copy quote

• In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Real, Character, Personality

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Light, Belief, Substitutes

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.91, Macmillan

  10 Copy quote

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