Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connorwas an American writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, she wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. Her writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously-compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 March 1925
CitySavannah, GA
CountryUnited States of America
[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 . . .
Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
If it's just a symbol, then to hell with it !
Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.
Kindness and patience were always called for ...
I don’t want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.
Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.
Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.
She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
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.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.