Flannery O'Connor Quotes - Page 4

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• If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Down And, Hunts, Ifs

  Flannery O'Connor (2015). “Wise Blood”, p.92, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

• Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Mean, Church, Doe

  23 Copy quote

• Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Children, Age, Firsts

  Flannery O'Connor (2014). “Mystery and Manners”, p.77, Faber & Faber

  15 Copy quote

• I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Overcoming, Half

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• The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Thinking, Personality, Catholic

  8 Copy quote

• Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Believe, Giving, Catholic

  15 Copy quote

• I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Reading, Writing, Blow

  12 Copy quote

• Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Self, Example

  5 Copy quote

• You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Attention, Reader, Knows

  7 Copy quote

• You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Pain, Effectiveness, Suffering

  9 Copy quote

• We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Judging, Doubt, Wish

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.117, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Children, Speed, Mercy

  Flannery O'Connor (1983). “Three by Flannery O'Connor: Wise blood, The violent bear it away, Everything that rises must converge”, Signet Classics

  17 Copy quote

• We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Taken, College, Childhood

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

  6 Copy quote

• The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Despair, Way, Kind

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.78, Macmillan

  18 Copy quote

• I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Thinking, Safe, Christ

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

  12 Copy quote

• When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Life, Spiritual, Lost

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.151, Macmillan

  12 Copy quote

• I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Atheist, Catholic, Would Be

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “Collected Works”, New York, NY : Library of America : Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press

  12 Copy quote

• A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Real, Responsibility, Use

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.81, Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

• The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” (August 9, 1955)

  Flannery O'Connor

  August, Church, Operations

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• Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Art, Creativity, Effort

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.189, Macmillan

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• I'm a full-time believer in writing habits...You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows awayOf course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Blow, Two

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• It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Fiction, Get Away

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.76, Macmillan

  29 Copy quote

• You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Confusing, Quitting, Madness

  Flannery O'Connor (2007). “The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel”, p.165, Macmillan

  21 Copy quote

• Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Children, Missing, Hell

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.244, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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