Flannery O'Connor Quotes

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

Day after day I look in the mirror and I still see something

To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

I am still a person with a sense of superficiality that I'm trying to challenge.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

I looked into that empty bottle and I saw myself.

I don't think we spend enough time in reflection and introspection. We don't know who we are as individuals in this culture anymore.

There are times I can't even figure myself out.

I think sometimes when you begin to examine things - like yourself - suddenly you can just freak out and not want to go any further.

I enjoy playing characters who are struggling, particularly with themselves.

My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.

Being down makes you think who you are.