Flannery O'Connor Quotes - Page 4

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• We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Judging, Doubt, Wish

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.117, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

• Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Art, Creativity, Effort

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.189, Macmillan

  11 Copy quote

• You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Confusing, Quitting, Madness

  Flannery O'Connor (2007). “The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel”, p.165, Macmillan

  22 Copy quote

• I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Thinking, Safe, Christ

  "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" (1960)

  13 Copy quote

• Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Principles, Politics, Policy

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• 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

  Smart, Book, Criticism

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.407, Macmillan

  17 Copy quote

• Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Children, Age, Firsts

  Flannery O'Connor (2014). “Mystery and Manners”, p.77, Faber & Faber

  16 Copy quote

• We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. 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. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Taken, College, Childhood

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.84, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

• The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Thinking, Personality, Catholic

  9 Copy quote

• Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Mean, Church, Doe

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Responsibility, Use

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.81, Macmillan

  9 Copy quote

• You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Attention, Reader, Knows

  8 Copy quote

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

  Flannery O'Connor

  Children, Missing, Hell

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.244, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Work Out, Would Be, Pay

  12 Copy quote

• The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Experience, Humans, Limitation

  Flannery O'Connor (2014). “Mystery and Manners”, p.74, Faber & Faber

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• You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Pain, Effectiveness, Suffering

  10 Copy quote

• Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Believe, Giving, Catholic

  16 Copy quote

• 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. I have also found that 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

  Reading, Writing, Blow

  13 Copy quote

• I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Three, Hours

  6 Copy quote

• Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Children, Speed, Mercy

  Flannery O'Connor (1983). “Three by Flannery O'Connor: Wise blood, The violent bear it away, Everything that rises must converge”, Signet Classics

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• I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Atheist, Catholic, Would Be

  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

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Self, Example

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• When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Life, Spiritual, Lost

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.151, Macmillan

  13 Copy quote

• Grace changes us and change is painful".

  Flannery O'Connor

  Southern, Grace, Painful

  9 Copy quote

• If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Animal, Would Be, Criminal Mind

  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

  13 Copy quote

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