Best Quotes by Flannery O'Connor (Top 10)

  1. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
  2. I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
  3. You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
  4. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
  5. 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.
  6. To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
  7. Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. [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 . . .

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