A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

by Flannery O'Connor

she lived quietly at Andalusia with her mother, going to daily Mass, writing, and raising her peacocks.

“Our salvation is a drama played out with the devil, a devil who is not simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy,”

The greatest lesson I have learned from the writer is not that the world is inherently unjust and indifferent to suffering, but that a person who struggles to be good needs to rage with every fiber of her being against this injustice and indifference, against the moral turpitude that allows evil to enter our souls. A writer’s role, O’Connor also tells us, is not to be a dispassionate recorder or mirror of this injustice, but to write out of an immovable and fiery ethical core in opposition to it.

Perhaps the most beautiful of all of these lessons, and the one that deserves to be shouted from the rooftops and heard by everyone, is that we should all pay attention to the mingled beauty and ridiculousness of the people around us; that we should seek to understand them through humor, which, as in the stories of Flannery O’Connor, is at its best and most effective when it is equal parts deadly weapon and act of grace.

“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”

I call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

That was what she wanted it to be—heart trouble.

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

Mr. Head turned slowly. He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation.

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

The sun burned so fast that it seemed to be trying to set everything in sight on fire.

the grass was an unnatural green as if it were turning to glass.

He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again.

Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.