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ddfc369
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Thomas had inherited his father's reason without his ruthlessness and his mother's love of good without her tendency to pursue it. His plan for all practical action was to wait and see what developed.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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1cef894
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Dear God please give me some place, no matter how small, but let me know it and keep it. If I am the one to wash the second step everyday, let me know it and let me wash it and let my heart overflow with love washing it.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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3df2589
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The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.
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writer
writing
christian-writers
novelist
realistic-fiction
writers-on-writing
perspective
perception
perception-of-reality
realism
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Flannery O'Connor |
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e80dca6
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Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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320bb92
|
Lady,' The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the wood, 'there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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48d64dd
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Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things. However,
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Flannery O'Connor |
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cf84572
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I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually--like this today. The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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1a9f152
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Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real - whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy. I mean that we always begin with what is or with what has an eminent possibility of truth about it. Even when one writes a fantasy, reality is the proper basis of it. A thing is fantastic because it is so real, so real that it is fantastic. Graham Greene has said that he can't write, "I stood over a bottoml..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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12c3a31
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There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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55ddc3f
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I don't know how to cure the source-itis except to tell you that I can discover a good many possible sources myself for Wise Blood but I am often embarrassed to find that I read the sources after I had written the book. I have been exposed to Wordsworth's "Intimation" ode but that is all I can say about it. I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out of the way it went in. The Oedipus business comes nearer home. Of course..
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wise-blood
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Flannery O'Connor |
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ebae6f8
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The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.
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humour
election
school
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Flannery O'Connor |
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edb722d
|
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 Savior at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had co..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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70cb71c
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She had managed after he died to get the two of them through college and beyond; but she had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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7e72cac
|
Writing this, he had reached the pit of despair and he thought that reading it, she would at least begin to sense his tragedy and her part in it. It was not that she had ever forced her way on him. That had never been necessary. Her way had simply been the air he breathed and when at last he had found other air, he couldn't survive in it. He felt that even if she didn't understand at once, the letter would leave her with an enduring chill a..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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b1104b0
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Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a great empty drum of flesh
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Flannery O'Connor |
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e8da501
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He saw that there was something alive in it, and went near enough to read a sign that said, TWO DEADLY ENEMIES. HAVE A LOOK FREE. There was a black bear about four feet long and very thin, resting on the floor of the cage; his back was spotted with bird lime that had been shot down on him by a small chicken hawk sitting on a perch in the upper part of the same apartment. Mose of the hawk's tail was gone; the bear only had one eye.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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8a389a7
|
Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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4fa9759
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The old woman's three mountains were black against the dark blue sky and were visited off and on by various planets and by the moon after it had left the chickens.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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934774a
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He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customers' families and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote 'cancer' after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word 'cancer' and wrote 'de..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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31d72a8
|
Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can ..
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writing
how-to-write-fiction
writing-quotes
writers-on-writing
novel
writers
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Flannery O'Connor |
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6187560
|
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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c805b7c
|
It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing. I
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Flannery O'Connor |
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98f1810
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The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
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southern-literature
writers
southern-fiction
southern-writers
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Flannery O'Connor |
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5b1a2fe
|
He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.
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writing
grace
redemption
human-nature
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Flannery O'Connor |
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de5a5d9
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Unfortunately, to try to disconnect faith from vision is to do violence to the whole personality, and the whole personality participates in the act of writing. The tensions of being a Catholic novelist are probably never balanced for the writer until the Church becomes so much a part of his personality that he can forget about her--in the same sense that when he writes, he forgets about himself.
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writing
faith
christian-writers
writing-fiction
fiction-writing
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Flannery O'Connor |
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a79aeb0
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I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an..
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structure
writing-craft
novel-writing
perception
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Flannery O'Connor |
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e08fe88
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She didn't like to admit it about her own kin, least about her own brother, but there he was--good for absolutely nothing.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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283fd2c
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The trouble with the world was that nobody stopped or took any care.
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work-ethic
thoroughness
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Flannery O'Connor |
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bad7198
|
I have heard people say that the short story was one of the most difficult literary forms, and I've always tried to decide why people feel this way about what seems to me to be one of the most natural and fundamental ways of human expression. After all, you begin to hear and tell stories when you're a child, and there doesn't seem to be anything very complicated about it. I suspect that most of you have been telling stories all your lives, ..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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7d52b85
|
The thing for you to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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22e2475
|
There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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83fad86
|
Listen, lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had b..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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16d7f6d
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Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.
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writing
writing-style
writers-on-writing
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Flannery O'Connor |
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2632e8b
|
I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it. But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who ..
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writing
how-to-write
how-to-write-fiction
writing-skills
writing-class
writing-talent
writing-fiction
writing-books
writers-on-writing
technique
writing-process
talent
writers
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Flannery O'Connor |
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ba6bbee
|
He kept on digging but the grave did not get any deeper. "The dead are poor," he said in the voice of the stranger. You can't be any poorer than dead."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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bedf1c3
|
To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape cam from the hand of Providence.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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c265fa1
|
Listen here, Mr. Shiftlet," she said, sliding forward in her chair, "you'd be getting a permanent house and a deep well and the most innocent girl in the world. You don't need no money. Lemme tell you something: there ain't any place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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733f36b
|
With a volley of blasts it emerged from the shed, moving in a fierce and stately way. Mr. Shiftlet was in the driver's seat, sitting very erect. He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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c6bfe97
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He said he had only a few days ago believed in blasphemy as the way to salvation, but that you couldn't even believe in that because then you were believing in something to blaspheme. As for the Jesus who was reported to have been born at Bethlehem and crucified on Calvary for man's sins, Haze said, He was too foul a notion for a sane person to carry in his head, and he picked up the boy's water bucket and bammed it on the concrete pavement..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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e562592
|
She appeared to adore Thomas's repugnance to her and to draw it out of him every chance she got as if it added delectably to her martyrdom.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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d870e44
|
Mrs. Pritchard could not stand an anticlimax. She required the taste of blood from time to time to keep her equilibrium.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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7ff5a43
|
The dead are a heap more trouble than the living.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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59675bb
|
I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stay's that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption...Jesus was a liar.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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ef32482
|
Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of ha..
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work
love
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Flannery O'Connor |