Flannery O'Connor Quotes

• To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

  Flannery O'Connor

• There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing

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

  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

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

  Flannery O'Connor

• The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

  Flannery O'Connor

• The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

  Flannery O'Connor

• 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

• It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

  Flannery O'Connor

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

  Flannery O'Connor

• 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

  Topics in Truth

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

  Flannery O'Connor

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

  Flannery O'Connor

  Topics in Humor

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

  Flannery O'Connor

• I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

  Flannery O'Connor

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

  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

• 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

• Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Conviction, Harshness

• The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Acceptance

Flannery O'Connor (41)

Birth:	25th March, 1925
Death:	3rd August, 1964
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

About

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

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