Flannery O'Connor Quotes

I think it's sad when people stop dreaming, or start losing hope. Because holding onto the bonkers dream might just turn out to be the most marvellous thing you ever did.

He thought there was no hope for him. Me? I can't imagine a world without hope.

Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.

With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.

If people come out of an election and everyone’s despairing, everyone’s in a collective civic funk, we don’t get anything done. Simply reminding people of how bad things are and what you lost, nobody’s moved by that. People are moved by the sense of possiblity, a sense of hope.

A novel is something, while despair is nothing.

We need hope. There's nothing worse than to live a life of despair. For a person to have no hope just sucks the blue out of every sky.

And one thing to be remembered: it is not that the people who are poor, starving, become frustrated with life - no. They cannot become frustrated. They have not lived yet - how can they be frustrated? They have hopes. A poor man always has hopes that something is going to happen - if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; if not in this life then in the next life.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

I love writing. I like reading, other people, not myself.

He who has never hoped can never despair

We always hope, and in all things it is better to hope than to despair.

Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away.

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.

Even if we're in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that's what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.

Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless.

Writing... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.

A reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination.

Farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear

Even the cry from the depths is an affirmation: Why cry if there is no hint of hope of hearing?

It's a lot better to hope than not to.

When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town.

When things are at their blackest, I say to myself, 'Cheer up, things could be worse.' And sure enough, they get worse.

It is a modern tragedy that despair has so many spokesmen, and hope so few.