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dd3348d
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Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.
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on-kissing
thought-provoking
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Flannery O'Connor |
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63b8fdc
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A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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02721dd
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Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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10cce15
|
He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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0add7f9
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It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural. He may be. No one certainly can be sure of his low motives except as they suggest themselves in his finished work, but when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, ..
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fiction
writing
writing-fiction
fiction-writing
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Flannery O'Connor |
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e59270f
|
For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of au..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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1be78c5
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I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to d..
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literature
great-writers
imitation
novelist
originality
writers
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Flannery O'Connor |
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180ad12
|
In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel's worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go..
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writing
writing-class
writing-skill
writing-talent
talent
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Flannery O'Connor |
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28c11c8
|
It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.
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writing
writing-fiction
writing-style
writers-on-writing
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Flannery O'Connor |
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0d30f47
|
Who's there?" the voice from inside said and there was a quality about it now that seemed final. The knob rattled and the voice said peremptorily, "Who's there, I ast you?" Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed keyhole. "Obadiah," he whispered and all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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8422f36
|
The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable.
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realism
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Flannery O'Connor |
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19bd0ef
|
The trouble with you is," she said, "you sit in front of that window all the time where there's nothing to look out at. You need some inspiration and an out-let. If you would let me pull your chair around to look at the TV, you would quit thinking about morbid stuff, death and hell and judgement. My Lord."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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a076882
|
Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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f4eda29
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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. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in ..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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805d5c9
|
There are those who maintain that you can't demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level. This supposes either that the aim of art is to teach, which it is not, or that to create anything which is simply a good-in-itself is a waste of time. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; ..
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criticism
beauty
truth
disicipline
appreciation
art
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Flannery O'Connor |
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1c06717
|
I am the menial, at the beck and squawk of any feathered worthy who wants service.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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72e5221
|
All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and o..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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55e7bcd
|
poetry is always dependent on realism, that you have to be a realist or you can't be a poet. Mrs.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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16474c5
|
Early in 1955 Flannery completed work on her second book, a collection of these stories which she entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find. In January we sent it to press, having set publication for June. I remember our amusement at Evelyn Waugh's reaction to the advance proofs we sent him: "If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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88630ba
|
It is when the individual's faith is weak, not strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost.
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fiction
faith
supernatural
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Flannery O'Connor |
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bd7dc92
|
Having been a Protestant, you may have the feeling that you must feel you believe; perhaps feeling belief is not always an illusion but I imagine it is most of the time; but I can understand the feeling of pain on going to Communion and it seems a more reliable feeling than joy. Do you know the Hopkins-Bridges correspondence? Bridges wrote Hopkins at one point and asked him how he could possibly learn to believe, expecting, I suppose, a met..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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6136062
|
Any criticism at all which depresses you to the extent that you feel you cannot ever write anything worth anything is from the Devil and to subject yourself to it is for you an occasion of sin. In you the talent is there and you are expected to use it. Whether the work itself is completely successful, or whether you ever get any worldly success out of it, is a matter of no concern to you. It is like the Japanese swordsmen who are indifferen..
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Flannery O'Connor |
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dae5ce5
|
She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn't have the brains to avoid evil without it.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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3e14608
|
I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and stil..
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reading
fiction
english-classes
english-degrees
college
|
Flannery O'Connor |
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3afb8b9
|
The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.
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writing
writing-groups
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Flannery O'Connor |
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cffccc5
|
Remember what you won't get if you don't mind," her grandfather remarked."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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27ecb78
|
The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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83d2cf1
|
The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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2d63831
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He was singing a hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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f470103
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I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing.
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personification
thought-provoking
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Flannery O'Connor |
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5960253
|
From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don't look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.
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explanations-in-charity
sign-of-maturity
scandal
sins
charity
maturity
hidden
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Flannery O'Connor |
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9102a0f
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Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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5a1a2fe
|
I watch the stock-car races sometimes but you don't see anything but cars. I know about Fireball Roberts though and I watched an interview with Tiny Lunn. He is a huge dead-serious innocent-faced boy who must have made it big, he had just won the one in Jacksonville when I saw him but he never smiled once.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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e03c4b6
|
Vi ar allesammans fordomda", sa hon, "men somliga av oss har tagit av oss ogonbindlarna och sett att inget finns att se. Det ar en slags fralsning."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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ed9c075
|
I don't want to be doomed to mediocrity in my feeling for Christ. I want to feel. I want to love. Take me, dear Lord, and set me in the direction I am to go
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life-lessons
love
christ
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Flannery O'Connor |
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dad36e6
|
That's not the way he told it, Tarwater said. He said that when the schoolteacher was seven years old, he had good sense but later it dried up. His daddy was an ass and not fit to raise him and his mother was a whore. She ran away from here when she was eighteen years old. It took her that long? the stranger said in an incredulous tone. My, she was kind of a ass herself.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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ba3b851
|
The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems of the spirit.
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honesty
ficiton
theology
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Flannery O'Connor |
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c265192
|
Do you think, Mr. Motes," she said hoarsely, "that when you're dead, you're blind?" "I hope so," he said after a minute. "Why?" she asked, staring at him. After a while he said, "If there's no bottom in your eyes, they hold more." The"
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Flannery O'Connor |
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f5aa04b
|
The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of ..
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fiction
southern
short-stories
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Flannery O'Connor |
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75f0150
|
Jesus died to redeem you," she said. "I never ast him," he muttered."
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Flannery O'Connor |
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f79dd82
|
There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful--the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliche, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the..
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writing-life
writing
fiction-writers
lonely-writer
novelists-life
writing-mindset
writing-myths
novelist
writers-on-writing
writing-process
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Flannery O'Connor |
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372a656
|
Sin is a great thing as long as it's recognized. It leads a good many people to God who wouldn't get there otherwise.
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Flannery O'Connor |
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53190e0
|
You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else," he said, "but you ain't! I'm the one has it. Not you. Me." Haze didn't say anything. He stood there for an instant, small in the"
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Flannery O’Connor |
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fb8ca6d
|
Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead." The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can--by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure b..
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Flannery O'Connor |