O'connor Quotes & Sayings

And as if suffering ever taught anybody a thing except to thank God when it ended. — Kelly O'Connor McNees

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

I was quietly rebellious. My parents thought I was very good but secretly I did things like saying I was staying in one place and going somewhere else instead. My older sister was openly rebellious and would tell my parents where to go, but I never did that. — Frances O'Connor

The most important thing I would learn in school was that almost everything I would learn in school would be utterly useless. When I was fifteen I knew the principal industries of the Ruhr Valley, the underlying causes of World War One and what Peig Sayers had for her dinner every day ... What I wanted to know when I was fifteen was the best way to chat up girls. That is what I still want to know. — Joseph O'Connor

Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed. — Anne-Marie O'Connor

Generally I don't listen to sad songs if I'm sad. I listen to happy songs. — Sinead 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

But, Mummy, couldn't God make another wars, but bad people."
"Oh!" I said.
I was disappointed about that. I began to think that God wasn't quite what he was cracked up to be. — Frank O'Connor

Fear has been my biggest friend. Fear of the unknown. Whenever I've been afraid, I've been very self-protective. — Erin O'Connor

I love actors who are wonderful - like John Cusack and Russell Crowe, and wouldn't it be a treat to eventually direct them one day. — Renee 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

I have two curiosity cabinets at home filled with finds from jumble sales, markets and my travels. My favourite piece is a voodoo mask from just outside Cape Town. — Erin O'Connor

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

At least I want to be making films that are somehow born out of me that are stories I want to tell. The challenge is figuring out how to do it where you can make them personal, yet still deliver to an audience a film experience that is satisfying and emotional, and that's what I'm trying to do. — Gavin O'Connor

You can't have a church run by people who don't believe in God. — Sinead O'Connor

When I sing, it's the most solitary state: just me, and the microphone, and the holy spirit. It's not about notes or scales, it's all about emotion. — Sinead O'Connor

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

Procrastination is a way for us to be satisfied with second-rate results; we can always tell ourselves we'd have done a better job if only we had more time...If you're good at rationalizing, you can keep yourself feeling rather satisfied this way, but it's a cheap happy. You're whittling your expectations of yourself down lower and lower. — Richard O'Connor

I don't believe in any kind of artistic snobbery or musical snobbery. You know, to me, the sexiest and the most spiritual words ever uttered in rock and roll are wop babaloo balop bam boom. — Sinead O'Connor

What I'm interested in is the protection of children from violence, and they are exposed to violence every single day in the form of, as it's called, the news. Then you wonder why the children are running around, doing the things in the streets, doing the things that they've seen the adults doing in the so-called news. — Sinead O'Connor

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

Even in my own time and in my own life, I have witnessed a revolution. — Sandra Day O'Connor

I thought the butler always did it," someone remarked under their breath. — Carlene O'Connor

Her [Jurdge Sandra Day O'Connor] judgment has also been critical in protecting our environmental rights. She joined in 5-4 majorities affirming reproductive freedom and religious freedom and the Voting Rights Act. — Patrick Leahy

What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention. — Varley O'Connor

I didn't smoke. I didn't smoke then, and I don't smoke now. We worked every day - that keeps you in pretty good shape. We could go for a long time in one take. You had to be in good shape with Gene Kelly. — Donald O'Connor

The dead man's face was pale and bloodless. The fierce white lights in the morgue showed up every detail mercilessly and every last pore and pock-mark was revealed, the history of a life, now reduced to a mere handful of scars.
'Always nice to see you Mark, but what brings you in so late on Friday afternoon?' Lambert said nothing, staring at Petrie's corpse, before turning to the coroner. John Humby was older and getting close to retirement and the two had been friends for a very long time. Humby resembled a large blood-hound, the more so the older he got and he was smiling over at Lambert, who was still thinking about the murder. — Stevie O'Connor

Sometimes at night I would look out and up at the glow rising up around me through the plastic and it would just make me shudder. It reminded me of larvae. We were like pale grubs in our eggs. When I got the horrors like that, I requested a little yellow pill from the dial-a-doc and flopped down into the fuzz along with everyone else. — Stevie O'Connor

In my job, I am portrayed as a misfit, a grandiose high fashion lady or an unearthly creature. At home, it's important I can look in the mirror, strip away the disguise and be comfortable with who stares back. — Erin O'Connor

I only feel better because people aren't being so abusive to me about my weight. — Sinead O'Connor

I think "God" is an off-putting word. I don't think there's a name for this. I think it's a presence that is best for us, but unfortunately, it can't intervene if we don't ask it, and religion has us talking to the wall because the god that religion is selling isn't the reality. — Sinead O'Connor

I don't do anything in order to cause trouble. It just so happens that what I do naturally causes trouble. I'm proud to be a troublemaker. — Sinead O'Connor

God needs to get rescued from religious music. — Sinead O'Connor

But as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn't expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God. — Joseph O'Connor

Perhaps the best antidote and preventive for burnout is the feeling of solid connection with the people in our lives. When we can share our frustrations with family and friends, our burden is eased and we can get new perspectives. — Richard 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

(W)e do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment. — Sandra Day O'Connor

I find that as a female boss in the music industry, it's difficult to actually be treated as if you actually are the boss and to have people act on your instructions and take you seriously. Like you call up people who are working for you and say, "I'd like to see such-and-such document," and they tell you that you don't need it. Then you have to spend time convincing them that it doesn't matter whether they think you need it or not, they're supposed to hand it to you. — Sinead O'Connor

God is something that needs rescuing from religion. — Sinead O'Connor

The President must be true to his word. He must keep his faith with the folks who elected him twice. In other words, he must replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a strict constructionist. The president has a God-given opportunity to change the balance on the Supreme Court. On issue after issue - abortion, sodomy, public display of the Ten Commandments - O'Connor has sided with the court's liberal bloc. Time and again, Justice O'Connor and her colleagues have used the Constitution as an excuse to force weird social experiments on the nation. — Rick Scarborough

I need to retire from retirement. — Sandra Day O'Connor

Everything is in the way the material is composed. — Joseph 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

There are three necessary elements in a story - exposition, development, and drama. Exposition we may illustrate as "John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little town of X"; development as "One day Mrs Fortescue told him she was about to leave him for another man"; and drama as "You will do nothing of the kind," he said. — Frank O'Connor

I sort of thought the framers of the Constitution were talking about the rights of individuals, not corporate entities. — Sandra Day O'Connor

Cycling is a great way to learn about your city. I love being outdoors, especially in good weather, but I'm not a fair weather cyclist. I'm happy to get a red nose in the cold. — Erin O'Connor

Fiction seeks to represent human experience as it is lived and as it reverberates in our hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. So much of our lives are internal. The art of fiction has claimed - more than anything else - this internal ground as its own. — Varley 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

The music business is a place where the artists are all treated like we're working for the people who are working for us. That can obviously be exaggerated when you're a female. — Sinead O'Connor

Now [Sue Grafton] loves writer's block, seeing it as a message from the psyche that the narrative is headed in the wrong direction. — Colleen 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

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

It is most heartening to learn that young men and women, in their late teens and twenties, are increasingly attracted to meditative prayer in the Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. May all the faithful find in the Eucharist their source of strength and courage to imitate our Lady, totally open to his will in their daily lives. It is my hope that this devotion to Jesus in the Eucharist will spread to more and more parishes and dioceses across our nation. — John Joseph O'Connor

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

It's OK to assert yourself. Obviously, as a woman, I do experience the consequence of asserting yourself - you're not supposed to assert yourself. — Sinead O'Connor

We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates. — Joseph O'Connor

And I went off to Stanford, I was pretty young and pretty naive. And I had a professor I really loved, who was himself a lawyer. — Sandra Day O'Connor

Someone once referred to modeling as being like winning the lottery gene pool. It's such an odd way to put things, but what is different about modelling is that the industry often picks you. — Erin O'Connor

Happy as a threaded needle — Joseph 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

Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy, — 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

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

(The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance. — Joseph O'Connor

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

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to make films. That's really all I ever wanted to do. — Gavin O'Connor

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

When Xena finished I just really wanted to work with Shakespeare's material. — Renee O'Connor

When I grew up in Ireland in the seventies there was no such thing as therapy ... I mean we didn't even have cappuccinos until 1998! So for me music was therapy, it was also the place where one could speak about himself, where he was allowed to speak about his traumatic experiences. — Sinead O'Connor

On the line beside Describe your family, I wrote, "Bad."

What is your favorite subject in school? "None."

List three of your favorite activities. "Soccer, ballet, and fighting."

Two of those favorite activities were lies but one of them was the truth.

I am fond of fighting. — Barbara O'Connor

And now, Irewen, I will ask what you hoped for all along. I have chosen you as my Protector. Will you allow me to be your Guardian? — Andi O'Connor

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

It's very hard to be perceived as a boss, and behaving like a boss or wanting to be treated like one. — Sinead 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

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

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

I don't want to go shoving what I believe down anyone's throat. Whatever I believe about Jesus is a personal thing, but it doesn't exclude all the others. — Sinead O'Connor

I'm a Holy Spirit maniac, yeah. When I say maniac, to me, a maniac is a person that goes around telling you what you should believe. You know, you have to believe what I believe, and I don't believe that. — Sinead O'Connor

The irony is that musical artists have enormous public voices, but behind the scenes we're voiceless, actually. — Sinead O'Connor

In Nam, the jungle's heat was heavy, and like a spoiled overweight child, it insisted on being carried everywhere. — Billy O'Connor

How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all. — Joseph 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

The thing I learned from 'Pride and Glory' is that people like to feel a little better leaving the theater than they did coming in. — Gavin 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

I've been on both sides: the victim and the villain. I was the victimised model, and everything from my weight to my fertility was held up for discussion. And then I was the person that could garner some kind of positive outcome, by taking on the role of vice chairman of the British Fashion Council and becoming an activist of body image. — Erin O'Connor