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Flannery O'Connor

36 quotes

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann Long by the Dominican Nuns of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home, Atlanta, GA (New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1964), p. 19. Compare: Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), ch…
“Mrs. May's bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened-like some patient god come down to woo her-for a stir inside the room.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: beginning of the story "Greenleaf" in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
“Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along about noon and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: first lines of The Violent Bear it Away (1960)
“...to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility, and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character. ("The Fiction Writer & His Country")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. ("Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. ("The Regional Writer")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 where the eyes, nose, and mouth are. ("Writing Short Stories")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. ("Writing Short Stories")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation. ("The Teaching of Literature")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in real life. ("Catholic Novelists and their Readers")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells. ("The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't write fiction. It isn't grand enough for you.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. (beginning of "Good Country People")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He didn't have any use for processions and a procession full of schoolteachers was about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking. ("A Late Encounter with the Enemy")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Negro will in the matter of a few years have his constitutional rights and we will all then see that the business of getting along with each other is much the same as it has always been, even though new manners are called for. The fiction writer is interested in individuals, not races; he knows that good and evil are not apportioned along racial lines and when he deals with topical matters, if he is any good, he sees the long run through the short run. (1963)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The short story writer particularly has to learn to read life in a way that includes the most possibilities--like the medieval commentators on scripture, who found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text. If you see things in depth, you will be more liable to write them that way. (1959)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times. (1959)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. (1958)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both. (1956)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries. (1956)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it....If you manage to use it successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you make it art first. (1956)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. (1955)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conviction without experience makes for harshness. (1955)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You weren't supposed to eat it. (year unkonwn)”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life. This sounds like a paradox, but I have often found it to be true.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian scepticism. It will keep you free-not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards-the color of silver-and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Head's trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant; but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated over the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him. (beginning of "The Artificial Nigger")”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge. The reason this clash doesn't bother me any longer is because I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can't fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. I might suggest that you look into some of the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenom of Man et al.). He was a paleontologist-helped to discover Peking man-and also a man of God. I don't suggest you go to him for answers but for different questions, for that stretching of the imagination that you need to make you a sceptic in the face of much that you are learning, much of which is new and shocking but which when boiled down becomes less so and takes its place in the general scheme of things.”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you want your faith, you have to work for it. It is a gift, but for very few is it a gift given without any demand for equal time devoted to its cultivation. For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture; if one isn't satisfactory read others. Don't think that you I have to abandon reason to be a Christian. A book that might help you is The Unity of Philosophical Experience by Etienne Gilson. Another is Newman's The Grammar of Assent. To find out about faith, you have to go to the people who have it and you have to go to the most intelligent ones”
Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source