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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on how a family environment can shape emotional expression, often leading to complex coping mechanisms.
Flannery O'Connor's quote illustrates the impact of familial expectations on emotional expression. In her family, expressing irritation was seen as the only acceptable emotion, which can lead to various personal reactions. For her, this duality manifests in physical symptoms like hives, as well as creative expression through literature—a way to process and cope with restricted emotions.
In practice
This quote can be used during a family therapy session to illustrate how family dynamics affect emotional health.
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.
In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
The child in me could not die as it should have died, because according too legends it must find its father again. The old legends knew, perhaps, that in absence the father becomes glorified, deified, eroticized, and this outrage against God the Father has to be atoned for. The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.
The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.
If the agency of the mother in forming the character of her children is, in truth, so considerable, as I think it - if she does so much toward making her son what she would wish him to be - how essential is it that she should be fitted for the beneficial performance of these important duties.
Sweet is the voice of a sister in the season of sorrow.
As I've mentioned, a large part of my father's legacy is the lesson he taught his sons. He brought us together and said, 'The measure of a man is how well he provides for his children.
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