110+ Flannery O'Connor Quotes On Writing, Grace And South

Flannery O'Connor was an American author from Georgia who wrote novels, short stories, and essays. She is known for her darkly humorous and often controversial works, which often explore themes of religion and morality. O'Connor is considered one of the most important authors of the Southern Gothic style of writing. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Flannery O'Connor on writing, love, grace.

Top 10 Flannery O'Connor Quotes

1. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
2. You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
3. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. [To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .
7. I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
8. I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
9. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
10. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Flannery O'Connor Image Quotes

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd. — Flannery O'Connor

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

Flannery O'Connor Short Quotes

• Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.
• To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
• Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.
• It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.
• You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
• It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.
• The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.
• Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.
• If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.
• I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Writing

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

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. — Flannery O'Connor

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much. — Flannery O'Connor

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. — Flannery O'Connor

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it. — 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

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live. — Flannery O'Connor

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best. — Flannery O'Connor

Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character. — Flannery O'Connor

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have. — Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Love

Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes. — Flannery O'Connor

He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery... — Flannery O'Connor

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing. — Flannery O'Connor

I love a lot of people, understand none of them. — Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Grace

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

Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don't want to have created God to my own image as they're so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don't let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it. — Flannery O'Connor

Grace changes us and change is painful". — Flannery O'Connor

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them. — Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Truth

The only way to the truth is through blasphemy. — Flannery O'Connor

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth. — 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

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth — Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Southern

Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. — 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

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime. — Flannery O'Connor

I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why. — Flannery O'Connor

It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity. — Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Writer

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. — Flannery O'Connor

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

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention. — Flannery O'Connor

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers. — Flannery O'Connor

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. — 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

In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn't stifle them enough. — 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

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

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business. — Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Writers

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles 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

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

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst. — Flannery O'Connor

Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life. — Flannery O'Connor

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing. — Flannery O'Connor

The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery; that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for. — Flannery O'Connor

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself. — Flannery O'Connor

I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas. — Flannery O'Connor

... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life. — Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Asked

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

Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen. — 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

Flannery O'Connor Famous Quotes And Sayings

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

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

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

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. — 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

I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see. — Flannery O'Connor

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

I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

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

...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

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

I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic. — Flannery O'Connor

Unadaptability is often a virtue. — 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

I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I'm sure of it. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God. — Flannery O'Connor

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. — Flannery O'Connor

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now. — Flannery O'Connor

On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think...of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome. — Flannery O'Connor

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. — Flannery O'Connor

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky. — 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

Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story. — Flannery O'Connor

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material. — Flannery O'Connor

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

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up. — Flannery O'Connor

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. — Flannery O'Connor

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better. — 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

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

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

He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.' 'What you got on it?' the girl said. 'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.' 'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely. — Flannery O'Connor

When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax. — Flannery O'Connor

Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter. — 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

The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree. — Flannery O'Connor

[Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. — 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

You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself. — Flannery O'Connor

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. — Flannery O'Connor

Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. — Flannery O'Connor

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots. — Flannery O'Connor

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done. — Flannery O'Connor

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

I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it. — Flannery O'Connor

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

She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything. — Flannery O'Connor

Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama . . . . Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe. — Flannery O'Connor

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily. — Flannery O'Connor

She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." "Some fun!" Bobby Lee said. "Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life. — Flannery O'Connor

It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries. — Flannery O'Connor

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas. — Flannery O'Connor

His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it. — Flannery O'Connor

The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation. — Flannery O'Connor

I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music. — Flannery O'Connor

Life Lessons by Flannery O'Connor

1. Flannery O'Connor encourages us to look for the grace of God in all things, even in the most difficult and trying of circumstances.
2. She also teaches us to be open to the possibility of redemption, no matter how dark and hopeless a situation may seem.
3. Finally, she reminds us to be aware of our own pride and to recognize that our own pride can often be a barrier to truly understanding the world around us.