Church Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

13 Church quotes by Flannery O'Connor

All Church quotes Flannery O'Connor’s page

O'Connor’s brief but sharp observations on the church hold a mirror to its quirks and contradictions. Though the list is modest, each of the 13 quotes provides a vivid glimpse into her incisive storytelling style.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

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

Image

It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.

Flannery O'Connor

Image

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

Flannery O'Connor

Image

I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical.…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

Other authors on Church

More by Flannery O'Connor

“Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

“I don’t know how to cure the source-itis except to tell you that I can discover a good many possible sources myself for Wise…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

“For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.”

Flannery O'Connor

Image

Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

Flannery O'Connor

Image

To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

Flannery O'Connor

Image

“He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”

Flannery O'Connor

Image

“Mrs. May winced. She thought the word Jesus should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.”

Flannery O'Connor

Image

I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present…

Flannery O'Connor

Image

“Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want…

Flannery O'Connor

Image