Posts tagged flannery o'connor
Let my children hear music!
“If it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.” -Flannery O’Connor
Habit of Being
Awesome new Flannery blog. I dig it.
Flannery Writes A Congratulatory Letter
She wrote this to a friend from college upon learning of the latter’s engagement. It is probably illegal to post this, so I’m going to say clearly that I got this from “The Habit of Being”, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. You should go buy that book, because it is filled with similarly adorable letters from everyone’s favorite Catholic author.-MIHMN
Dear Betty,
In honor of my nuptial blessing I am writing on white paper, 16 pound bond, suitable (and left over from) 2nd and 3rd copies of theses. The following are violets:
[a row of three disheveled flowers]
or at least I would have you think of them as such.
Marriages are always such a shock to me.
Will you live in Los Angeles & take a Los Angeles paper?
I would like to send you a teasespoon[sic]. What kind would you like me to send?
I am leaving a large space at the bottom to make this look more nuptial.
An abundance of peace,
Flannery
Is it bad to skip Mass if you do it in order to pick up a huge pile of free books?
What if those books include A Kempis, Aristotle, Chesterton, O’Connor, Milton, and Chaucer?
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. 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.
Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being
Yup. Philosophical issues aside, Rand was simply a terrible writer.
I can’t climb down off the high powered defense reflex whateveritis. The fleas come with the dog as Mr. McG says. If you were Pius XII, my communications would still sound as if they came from a besieged defender of the faith. I know well enough that it is not a defense of the faith, which don’t need it, but a defense of myself who does. The Church becomes a part of your ego and gets messed in with your own impurity. It’s a situation I can’t handle myself so I wait for purgatory to do it for me.
Flannery O’Connor (via dailyflanneryoc)
I need to have something to this effect tattooed on my forehead.
Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin. I find it in myself and don’t dislike it any less.
(via invisibleforeigner)
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.
(via badwolfcomplex)
“I have found, in short, from readying my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”
- Flannery O’Connor
<3
“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.” —Flannery O’Connor
^this. Can I go back in time an marry her?
(via invisibleforeigner)
