A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

by Flannery O'Connor

At the deepest, most molten core of all of O’Connor’s work is her Catholicism, or, as she says, “the stinking mad shadow of Jesus.” Every story she wrote hinges upon her characters’ stain of original sin, and what grace they are sometimes allowed is hard won, fleeting, and almost always too late to make much of a difference in the end.

“You can’t indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment,”

It was with a sense of outraged irony that O’Connor discovered that her German publisher—only a few short years from the horrors of the Holocaust—wanted to pull a few of her stories from its edition because they would be “too shocking” for German sensibilities. “I didn’t think I was that vicious,” she wrote a friend, dryly.

In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

He seemed to be a young man but he had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.

It was mortifying to let that kind of a husband see you had that kind of a brother.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades.