Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

About Flannery O'Connor:

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, she wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. Her writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.

Flannery O'Connor

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

Flannery O'Connor

Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.

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

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

Remember what you won't get if you don't mind," her grandfather remarked.

Flannery O'Connor

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.

Flannery O'Connor

Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.

Flannery O'Connor

He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.

Flannery O'Connor

The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don't hold nothing back.

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

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

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

Flannery O'Connor

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Flannery O'Connor

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

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...

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

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

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 i...

Flannery O'Connor

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

Flannery O'Connor

Author Bio

  • NameFlannery O'Connor
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist, short story writer
  • BornMarch 25, 1925
  • DiedAugust 3, 1964
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksWise Blood; The Violent Bear It Away; A Good Man Is Hard To Find
  • AwardsNational Book Award