Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was a novelist, short story writer and essayist who lived in Georgia, USA. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.

• 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.
  • 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.
  • 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")

• 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")

• 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")

• 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")

• 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")

• I believe that the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation. ("The Teaching of Literature")

• The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in real life. ("Catholic Novelists and their Readers")

• 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")

• I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

• The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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")

• 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")

• 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")

sourced from Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee (1987) unless otherwise noted

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. (1958)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. (1955)

• Conviction without experience makes for harshness. (1955)

• charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity.

• About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• ...Men and women do not write differently. In the United States, for example, the best of contemporary prose-writers is a woman - - recently deceased.
  • 1970 interview included in Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop Edited by George Monteiro (1996)

• That's one of the reasons I love O'Connor: Everything is so Catholic and bizarre at the same time.
  • 1986 interview in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (1994)

• As Flannery O'Connor once noted, writers are difficult biographical subjects; her own life story, O'Connor said, consisted mostly of walking from the house to the barn and back again.
  • 1991 interview in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (1994)

• Every young writer should read Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find at least three or four times. If you’ve ever thought creativity was opposed to clarity, or that funny stories aren’t serious, or that stories about abnormal people are about abnormal people, or that the road to the realistic was through realism—O’Connor is here to disabuse you, with pleasure. And do take note of her characterization and story structure, too! Textbook.
  • Gish Jen interview quoted here

• I can think of no American writer who has made a more devastating use of existential intuition. She does so, of course, without declamation, without program, without distributing manifestoes, and without leading a parade.
  • Thomas Merton, "The Other Side of Despair" published first in The Critic and collected in Mystics and Zen Masters (1963)

• The greatest of Flannery O'Connor's books is her last, post-humously-published collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. Though it is customary to interpret O'Connor's allusion to the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin as ironic, it seems to me that there is no irony involved. There are many small ironies in these nine stories, certainly, and they are comic-grotesque and flamboyant and heartbreaking- but no ultimate irony is intended and the book is not a tragic one. It is a collection of revelations; like all revelations, it points to a dimension of experiential truth that lies outside the sphere of the questing, speculative mind, but which is nevertheless available to all.
  • Joyce Carol Oates "The Visionary Art of Flannery O'Connor," Southern Humanities Review, vol. 7, no. 3 (Summer, 1973)

• There are lots of women writers in the South, like Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, who wrap you up in a story. They come from a tradition of storytellers which is amazingly similar to the Puerto Rican cuento. "Te voy a echar un cuento," eso era eso era lo que Mamá decía. (CDH: The tradition of oral transmission is common among minorities, especially among immigrants.) JOC: Of course. When you read Flannery O'Connor, you almost hear her. It wasn't until I was an adult that I discovered Latino writers who do the same thing, but by that time I had been influenced by the storytellers of the South and by my grandmother.
  • Judith Ortiz Cofer Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers Carmen Dolores Hernandez 1997

• Flannery O'Connor-I use her all the time in my classes, and I tell my students, "Look, look what she's done." The students'd say, "Oh, she just writes about the same old area and countryside." "Well," I said, "yes, that's true. I understand as a person, especially as she was ill in her later years, she really didn't move around very much," and I said, "and that in a sense is one of her greatest achievements, just to take these same sorts of things again and again and again to make these magnificent stories, you know.
  • 1976 interview collected in Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko edited by Ellen L. Arnold (2000)

• She was for me the first great modern writer from the South, and was, in any case, the only one I had read who wrote such sly, demythifying sentences about white women as: "The woman would be more or less pretty-yellow hair, fat ankles, muddy-colored eyes.
  • Alice Walker, "Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O'Connor," from In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)

• O’Connor’s works are full of evil mockery, occasionally reminiscent of Baudelaire or Kundera. Don’t expect to find things like love, tenderness, or sentiment in her stories. This makes me tremendously happy.
  • A Yi interview quoted here

• https://www.flanneryoconnorhome.org/flannery Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home Museum]
• New Georgia Encyclopedia page
• Goodreads page