Mary Flannery O’Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfection or difference of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion or sanity) typically underpins the drama. May these Flannery O’Connor Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. “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
2. “Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.” Flannery O’Connor
3. “I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.” Flannery O’Connor
4. “A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.” Flannery O’Connor
5. “I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.” Flannery O’Connor
6. “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
7. “We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.” Flannery O’Connor
8. “Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.” Flannery O’Connor
9. “I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.” Flannery O’Connor
10. “People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.” Flannery O’Connor
11. “You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.” Flannery O’Connor
12. “Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative, they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.” Flannery O’Connor
13. “The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.” Flannery O’Connor
14. “Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.” Flannery O’Connor
15. “Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.” Flannery O’Connor
16. “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” Flannery O’Connor
17. “If we forget our past, we won’t remember our future and it will be as well because we won’t have one.” Flannery O’Connor
18. “It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.” Flannery O’Connor
19. “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
20. “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.” Flannery O’Connor
21. “In most good stories, it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.” Flannery O’Connor
22. “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.” Flannery O’Connor
23. “Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.” Flannery O’Connor
24. “Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.” Flannery O’Connor
25. “You have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.” Flannery O’Connor
26. “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.” Flannery O’Connor
27. “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Flannery O’Connor
28. “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” Flannery O’Connor
29. “If we forget our past, we won’t remember our future and it will be as well because we won’t have one.” Flannery O’Connor
30. “Remember that you don’t write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.” Flannery O’Connor
31. “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” Flannery O’Connor
32. “I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.” Flannery O’Connor
33. “You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
34. “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” Flannery O’Connor
35. “Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.” Flannery O’Connor
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