Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Quality

Quotes about: Quality

• There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech

  Flannery O'Connor

  Two, Southern, Quality

• I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Thinking, Quality

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.10, Macmillan

• 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

  People, Quality, Use

  Flannery O'Connor (2016). “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, p.116, Faber & Faber

• There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Stupidity, Quality

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.77, Macmillan

• When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... 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

  Writing, Southern, Quality

  "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" (1960)

• On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think...of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Sex, Thinking, Class

• ... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Men, Afterlife, Personality

  Flannery O'Connor (1993). “"A Good Man is Hard to Find"”, p.59, Rutgers University Press

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