Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
. . . the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.
The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.
I'm a full-time believer in writing habits. . . You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows awayOf course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.
Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues. . . you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity. . . you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.
Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.
When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.
the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.
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.
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.
There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech
You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.
Grace changes us and change is painful".
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.