Best Quotes by Flannery O'Connor (Top 10)
-
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Flannery O'Connor
-
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
Flannery O'Connor
-
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
Flannery O'Connor
-
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
Flannery O'Connor
-
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.
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
-
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
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
-
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
Flannery O'Connor
-
[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 . . .
Flannery O'Connor
More Flannery O'Connor Quotes
-
I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
Flannery O'Connor
-
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.
Flannery O'Connor
-
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Flannery O'Connor
-
Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
Flannery O'Connor
-
I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
Flannery O'Connor
-
Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor
-
When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.
Flannery O'Connor
-
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
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
-
It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.
Flannery O'Connor
-
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
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
-
I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
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