Frank O'Connor Quotes

“Even if there were only two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn't be happy. One them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things.”

— Frank O'Connor

“I was a great believer in hot buttered toast at all hours of the day.”

— Frank O'Connor

No man is as anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.

— Frank O'Connor

“A grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.”

— Frank O'Connor

“But, Mummy, couldn't God make another wars, but bad people."
"Oh!" I said.
I was disappointed about that. I began to think that God wasn't quite what he was cracked up to be.”

— Frank O'Connor

I was always a great believer in buttered toast.

— Frank O'Connor

“A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.”

— Frank O'Connor

“And what's a-trouble to you, Jackie?"
"Father," I said, feeling I might as well get it over while I had him in
good humour, "I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother."
He seemed a bit shaken by that, all right, because he said nothing
for quite a while.
"My goodness," he said at last, "that'd be a shocking thing to do.
What put that into your head?"
Father," I said, feeling very sorry for myself, " she's an awful woman.”

— Frank O'Connor

“So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all the radiance and charm of a virgin of seventeen.”

— Frank O'Connor

“Tom looked more and more like a rabbi. As is the way of men of character in provincial towns, he tended to become a collection of mannerisms, a caricature of himself.”

— Frank O'Connor

“But my dear young lady," he said offering a cigarette, "who ever said I have a poor opinion of women? On the contrary, I have a very high opinion of women, and the more I see of them the more I like them.”

— Frank O'Connor

“I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whole world is in it, and bit by bit grows on us again till the day You find us out.”

— Frank O'Connor

“All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.”

— Frank O'Connor

Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society ... As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel
an intense awareness of human loneliness.

— Frank O'Connor

The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.

— Frank O'Connor

“There are three necessary elements in a story - exposition, development, and drama. Exposition we may illustrate as "John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little town of X"; development as "One day Mrs Fortescue told him she was about to leave him for another man"; and drama as "You will do nothing of the kind," he said.”

— Frank O'Connor

“I cant write about something I dont admire. It goes back to the old concept of the celebration: you celebrate the hero, an idea.”

— Frank O'Connor