Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connorwas an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, she wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. Her writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously-compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 March 1925
CitySavannah, GA
CountryUnited States of America
You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.
There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.
When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.
The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.
[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 . . .
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Unadaptability is often a virtue.
When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.