Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• 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

  Teacher, Writing, School

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.140, Macmillan

• 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

  Despair, Age, Literature

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.159, Macmillan

• Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Faith, Believe, Literature

• 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

  Irritation, Literature, Emotion

  Flannery O'Connor (2012). “Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons”, p.112, Fantagraphics Books

• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Education, Teacher, Women

  Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose "The Nature and Aims of Fiction" (1969)

• The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Doe, Attention, Literature

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.84, Macmillan

• It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Success, Failure, Novelists

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.306, Macmillan

• I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Truth, Atheism, Literature

  1952 HazelMotes. Wise Blood, ch.10.

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

  Flannery O'Connor

  Rome, Done, Literature

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.220, Macmillan

• I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Heart, Thinking

• The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Literature, Able

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.27, Macmillan

• Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Novelists, Literature, Losing

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.29, Macmillan

• the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Experience, Literature

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.45, Macmillan

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