Flannery O’Connor quotes

Flannery O’Connor was an influential American author renowned for her distinctive Southern Gothic style and sharp exploration of morality and faith. Her most famous works include short stories such as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and the novel "Wise Blood." She continually challenged readers with her complex characters and darkly humorous portrayal of the American South. Here are 96 of her quotes:

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

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

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Flannery O’Connor

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Flannery O’Connor

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

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Flannery O’Connor

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Flannery O’Connor

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

Flannery O’Connor

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

Flannery O’Connor

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

Flannery O’Connor

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Flannery O’Connor

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

Flannery O’Connor

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

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Flannery O’Connor

She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

Flannery O’Connor

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

Flannery O’Connor

He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.

Flannery O’Connor

He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.' 'What you got on it?' the girl said. 'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.' 'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.

Flannery O’Connor

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

Flannery O’Connor

The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.

Flannery O’Connor

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.

Flannery O’Connor