Flannery Quotes & Sayings

If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference. — Flannery O'Connor

You have to stop confusing a madness with a mission — Flannery O'Connor

When we get our spiritual house in order, we'll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don't expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty. — Flannery O'Connor

I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. — Flannery O'Connor

A God you understood would be less than yourself. — 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

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

When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself. — Flannery O'Connor

Mother!" he cried. "Darling, sweetheart, wait!" Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, "Mamma, Mamma!" He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed. "Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow. — Flannery O'Connor

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville. — 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

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

The last thing I would want is for Monbiot, Mann, Flannery, Jones, Hansen and the rest of the Climate rogues' gallery to be granted the mercy of quick release. Publicly humiliated? Yes please. Having all their crappy books remaindered? Definitely. Dragged away from their taxpayer funded troughs and their cushy sinecures, to be replaced by people who actually know what they're talking about? For sure. But hanging? Hell no. Hanging is far too good for such ineffable toerags. — James Delingpole

I have tried imagining that the single peacock I see before me is the only one I have, but then one comes to join him, another flies off the roof, four or five crash out of the crepe-myrtle hedge; from the pond one screams and from the barn I hear the dairyman denouncing another that has got into the cow-feed. My kin are given to such phrases as, 'Let's face it. — Flannery O'Connor

And as for that strangeness in your gut, that comes from you, not the Lord. When you were a child you had worms. As likely as not you have them again. — 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

I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay. — Donald Ray Pollock

A cloud, the exact color of the boy's hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him. — Flannery O'Connor

I love Crews, but had been writing a long time before I knew of him. I learned of him because a friend thought we were similar. The reason we are is we were both heavily influenced by Flannery O'Conner. She was wonderful. — Joe R. Lansdale

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques. — Robert Morgan

I come a long way since I would believe anything. I come halfway around the world. — Flannery O'Connor

He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customers' families and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote 'cancer' after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word 'cancer' and wrote 'dead' there. "And I say thank God when they're dead," the salesman said; "that's one less to remember. — Flannery O'Connor

I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside. — Flannery O'Connor

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. — Flannery O'Connor

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes. — Flannery O'Connor

You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction. — Flannery O'Connor

The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity ... — Flannery O'Connor

Poorly written novels
no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters
are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying. — Flannery O'Connor

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me. — 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 groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled into it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station — Flannery O'Connor

With a volley of blasts it emerged from the shed, moving in a fierce and stately way. Mr. Shiftlet was in the driver's seat, sitting very erect. He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead. — 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

Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual. — Flannery O'Connor

I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself. — 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

But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God. — Flannery O'Connor

Some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation. — Flannery O'Connor

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness. — Flannery O'Connor

The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible. — Flannery O'Connor

True culture is in the mind, the mind," he said, and tapped his head, "the mind." "It's in the heart," she said, "and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are." "Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are." "I care who I am," she said icily. — Flannery O'Connor

I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. 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

Having been a Protestant, you may have the feeling that you must feel you believe; perhaps feeling belief is not always an illusion but I imagine it is most of the time; but I can understand the feeling of pain on going to Communion and it seems a more reliable feeling than joy. Do you know the Hopkins-Bridges correspondence? Bridges wrote Hopkins at one point and asked him how he could possibly learn to believe, expecting, I suppose, a metaphysical answer. Hopkins only said, "Give alms. — Flannery O'Connor

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

The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror. — Flannery O'Connor

Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka. — 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

There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion — Flannery O'Connor

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

Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff. — Karin Slaughter

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

When he was four years old, his father had brought him home a tin box from the penitentiary. It was orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle on the outside of it and green letters that said, "A NUTTY SURPRISE!" When Enoch had opened it, a coiled piece of steel had sprung out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth. His life was full of so many happenings like that that it would seem he should have been more sensitive to his times of danger. — Flannery O'Connor

I think the whole concept that women aren't funny is dead. It's over; it's done. — Kate Flannery

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 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

[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

Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative. — Phil Klay

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

A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story. — 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

Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God! — 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

That's not the way he told it, Tarwater said. He said that when the schoolteacher was seven years old, he had good sense but later it dried up. His daddy was an ass and not fit to raise him and his mother was a whore. She ran away from here when she was eighteen years old.

It took her that long? the stranger said in an incredulous tone. My, she was kind of a ass herself. — Flannery O'Connor

I guess a good man IS hard to find! — Flannery O'Connor

When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. — Flannery O'Connor

Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know. — Flannery O'Connor

Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did. — Flannery O'Connor

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. — Flannery O'Connor

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing. — Flannery O'Connor

You'll learn. It takes time to kill the flesh, honey. It's kind of like those candles your father used to put on Mitchell's cake
the ones that relight when you think they're out. You've got to keep huffing and puffing and maybe even use the help of water before it's over, but eventually it's over, and that candle can't be lit even if you try
-Mrs. Flannery — Heather Randall

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

Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy, — Flannery O'Connor

Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a great empty drum of flesh — Flannery O'Connor

Wherever it left us,
we were barely learning to live with it
when here came Flannery O'Connor and Hank Williams
to tell us that no one has ever been loved
the way everybody wants to be loved,
and that's hard. That's hard.
last stanza of How Step by Step We Have Come to Understand — Miller Williams

Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow. — Flannery O'Connor

Women are impossible, witches are worse, and women who are powerful witches are going to be the death of me. — Cate Tiernan

I cannot believe that in all the years that there have been female stand-ups, there has never been a show just for them. — Kate Flannery

If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet. — Flannery O'Connor

I believe firmly in mystery and manners. — Flannery O'Connor

He was bald-headed except for a little fringe of rust-colored hair and his face was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like them with ruts and gullys. — Flannery O'Connor

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. — Flannery O'Connor

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear. — Flannery O'Connor

The trouble with the world was that nobody stopped or took any care. — Flannery O'Connor

highway after the boy. — 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

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people's sufferings and not your own. — Flannery O'Connor

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

The novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture. — 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

Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it. — Flannery O'Connor

She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life. — Flannery O'Connor

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

No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try. — David Sedaris

She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn't have the brains to avoid evil without it. — Flannery O'Connor

People without hope do not write novels ... [Writing fiction] is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal. — Flannery O'Connor

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. — Flannery O'Connor

In 1964, at the age of 39, Flannery O'Connor died from complications of lupus. She had lived with this autoimmune disease for 14 years, primarily confined to her mother's farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Ga. — Floyd Skloot

One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club. — 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

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