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4cd0a13
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Leave!' Hazel Motes cried. 'Go ahead and leave! The truth don't matter to you. Listen,' he said, pointing his finger at the rest of them, 'the truth don't matter to you. If Jesus had redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? You wouldn't do nothing about it. Your faces wouldn't move, neither this way nor that, and if it was three crosses there and Him hung on the middle one, that wouldn't mean no more to you and me than the other ..
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christianity
hypocrisy
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Flannery O'Connor |
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c1634eb
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His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him he didn't have any soul and left for the brothel. He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw opportunity here to get rid of it ..
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boxing-with-god
rust
shrapnel
atheism
soul
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Flannery O'Connor |
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7def6ab
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You might as well go one place as another," he said. "That's all I know."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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733b2fd
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Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual.
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b-a-s-s
greenleaf
o-henry-memorial
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Flannery O'Connor |
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4395674
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Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.
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writing
writers
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Flannery O'Connor |
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f315c7d
|
My mamma and I have interesting literary discussions like the following which took place over some Modern Library books that I had just ordered: SHE: "Mobby Dick. I've always heard about that." ME: "Mow-by Dick." SHE: "Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called Idiot. What's it about?" ME: "An idiot."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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0e4856a
|
The virtue of hope, in Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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af60ed3
|
sitting with him was like sitting by yourself; he didn't talk except when it suited him. You asked him a question in the morning and he might answer in the afternoon, or he might never.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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421f3e2
|
It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.
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unconditional-love
parenting
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Flannery O'Connor |
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f7c3755
|
We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn't have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. That is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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2630c19
|
Nothing is like it used to be, lady," he said. "The world is almost rotten."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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6812763
|
True culture is in the mind, the mind," he said, and tapped his head, "the mind." "It's in the heart," she said, "and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are." "Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are." "I care who I am," she said icily."
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Flannery O’Connor |
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70e5626
|
The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
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the-nature-and-aim-of-fiction
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Flannery O'Connor |
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9b2f076
|
Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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06f4473
|
The park was the heart of the city. He had come to the city - and with a knowing in his blood - he had established himself at the heart of it. Everyday he looked at the heart of it; every day; he was so stunned and awed and overwhelmed that just to think about it made him sweat. There was something, in the center of the park, that he had discovered. It was a mystery although it was in a glass case for everybody to see and there was a typewr..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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640bd9f
|
The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are...There's a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive...
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living
flannery
mason
o-connor
tarwater
away
bear
the
violent
it
dead
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Flannery O'Connor |
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8ac201e
|
The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months. "It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto B..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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0462df2
|
Silly that a grocery should depress one--nothing in it but trifling domestic doings--women buying beans--riding children in those grocery go-carts--higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less of squash--what did they get out of it? Miss Willerton wondered. Where was there any chance for self-expression, for creation, for art? All around her it was the same--sidewalks full of people scurrying about with their hands full of little packag..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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b140cd3
|
Most things are beyond me," Block said. "I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood,"
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Flannery O'Connor |
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3529a42
|
Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of "Wise Blood" that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote "Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant . . ."
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southern-writers
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Flannery O'Connor |
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6b20eb4
|
I have 50 or 60 pages on the [new] novel but I still expect to be a long time at it. It's a theme that requires prayer and fasting to make it get anywhere. I manage to pray but am a very sloppy faster.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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0fc4414
|
I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out of the way it went in.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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7ac0f3e
|
There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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bd99b16
|
He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt re..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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5f599b1
|
You can't just say NO," he said. "You got to do NO. You got to show it. You got to show you mean it by doing it. You got to show you're not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to make an end of it. One way or another."
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behavior
repentance
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Flannery O'Connor |
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5437ce8
|
Its face was like the face she had seen in some medieval paintings where the martyr's limbs are being sawed off and his expression says he is being deprived of nothing essential.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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2800a35
|
In short, I am amenable to criticism, but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not pretend to do otherwise.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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cb534bd
|
She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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ac8d9de
|
His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it.
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beautiful
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Flannery O'Connor |
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286d777
|
The first product of self-knowledge is humility.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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00dc5d3
|
The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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592b933
|
He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn't kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up. He stepped down and greeted her.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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ef3730c
|
I hope you understand that it is not the tooth of the saber-toothed tiger I want, it is the . I don't care if it's a old toothless tiger or not, just so it's alive. I intend to start a zoo.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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189d970
|
If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a ..
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writing
writers
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Flannery O'Connor |
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4501a4e
|
With the energy he had conserved yesterday letting her dress him, he had written a note and pinned it in his pocket. IF FOUND DEAD SHIP EXPRESS COLLECT TO COLEMAN PARRUM, CORINTH, GEORGIA. Under this he had continued: COLEMAN SELL MY BELONGINGS AND PAY THE FREIGHT ON ME & THE UNDERTAKER. ANYTHING LEFT OVER YOU CAN KEEP. YOURS TRULY T. C. TANNER. P.S. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. DON'T LET THEM TALK YOU INTO COMING UP HERE. ITS NO KIND OF PLACE.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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8e09404
|
Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do t..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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c0fd80c
|
You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.
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fiction
christian-literature
fiction-writing
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Flannery O'Connor |
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fc0e46d
|
I don't know which is worse--to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and..
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education
teaching-writing
writing-class
guidance
observation
writing-process
perception
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Flannery O'Connor |
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1865635
|
The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. The Catholic fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly f..
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how-to-write
writing-fiction
observation
fiction-writing
novel-writing
perception
world-view
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Flannery O'Connor |
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c0a81de
|
Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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6afb1b8
|
The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorr.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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ecac564
|
He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled into it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station
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Flannery O'Connor |
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54065f9
|
I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate. She said she reckoned they said, "The lame shall enter first." This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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02f50e5
|
I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord. Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.
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Flannery O’Connor |