Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

I'd never been content in America.

Disaffection stalks around us.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

I never loved the world around me as it was.

I think it's true of a lot of teenagers that you're convinced that life is happening somewhere else.

There are times when you wish you were somewhere else, and someone else.

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

There's always this thing of wanting to be elsewhere.

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

Seven out of 10 Americans, they do not like the direction our country is going. Many of our fellow citizens feel alienated and have lost faith in our core institutions. They don't feel heard and they don't feel represented by those in office.

I hate this feeling. Like I'm here, but I'm not. Like someone cares. But they don't. Like I belong somewhere else, anywhere but here, and escape lies just past that snowy window, cool and crisp as the February air.

My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed." "... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here." "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

It's the relationship I have with the world: always trying to escape from reality. I'm a daydreamer; I don't feel in harmony with my epoch or the societies I live in.

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be somebody else and live somewhere else. I've always felt a little uncomfortable around people.

I feel like sometimes that I was not meant for this society.

It's true, I don't like the real world.

Nothing seems to me so likely to make people unhappy in themselves and at variance with others as the habit of killing time.

I always knew that I was kind of bored; the regular life of a child didn't fit me.

May we not look for Discontent, Mistrust, Disaffection to Government and frequent Insurrections?

Your people do not seem to like the place where they live and always want to be on the move going someplace else.

I feel like I was born in the wrong time.

Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, 'I remember, I remember the house where I was born.' I don't even know what mine looked like!