O’Connor was born Mary Flannery O’Connor on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, GA, and was an only child, per the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home Museum. She went to Georgia State College for Women, graduating in 1945 with a degree in social science. She then got a journalism scholarship to the University of Iowa, but ended up transferring to the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. Post-college, O’Connor moved to New York City and Connecticut to hopefully get her stories published, but after her diagnosis of lupus in 1951, she had to move back to Georgia to live with her mother on the family farm.
Today’s quote comes from a collection of her letters and highlights the notion that no matter how you feel about the truth of something, you can’t change it.
Related: Quote of the Day: Poet Edgar Allan Poe on the Power of Creativity, Imagination and Daydreaming
Quote of the Day by Flannery O’Connor
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This quote appears in the book, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, which was published in 1980 and edited by O’Connor’s friend, Sally Fitzgerald. It features a collection of over 800 letters written by O’Connor, and spans from 1948, right before her first novel was published, to 1964, a few days before her death. Specifically, this line is in “Part II: Day In and Day Out 1953-1958.”
Fitzgerald wrote that O’Connor’s “acceptance was more graceful than merely stoic” regarding her diagnosis and new life changes afterward. She also said that the novelist had learned a new phrase—“passive diminishment,” which means to calmly accept hardships in your life that you cannot change—and instilled it into her life. And even though she worked alone a lot of the time, she still included friends and others in her process in later stages, and was there for friends when they needed her.
She then writes that such a higher power can confuse humans, and the truth can be revealed to be “hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive.” She states that faith isn’t meant to be emotionally satisfying, even going one step further, saying those who believe that their faith is such are “repugnant” to O’Connor.
O’Connor had a very deep Catholic faith and was willing to believe in something even if it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Even outside of the context that O’Connor is talking about faith and believing in God, this quote is a good one to remember now and then.
Given the context of O’Connor being diagnosed with lupus a few years before this, these words are even more stark or scathing. Even if she doesn’t mean for her sentiment to be harsh, her words depict a harsh reality that, even in the face of inevitable death or lifelong health problems, that fact is still going to remain.
Related: Quote of the Day: Psychologist Gordon Allport on Humor Being the Best Way To Fight Life’s ‘Tangles’
More Quotes from Flannery O’Connor
“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”“I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.”“Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.”“Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.”“It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.”Related: Quote of the Day: Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on Inner Light and Resilience Being 'Like Stained-Glass Windows’
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