A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.”

She considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act.

“It means they ain’t where they were born at and there’s nowhere for them to go—like if you was run out of here and wouldn’t nobody have you.”

She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.

Mrs. Hopewell said that people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not.

“If this place was not here any more,” he said, “you would never have to think of it again.”

Mrs. Pritchard studied the woods. “All I got is four abscess teeth,” she remarked.
“Well, be thankful you don’t have five,” Mrs. Cope snapped and threw back a clump of grass. “We might all be destroyed by a hurricane. I can always find something to be thankful for.”

“The day is going to come,” Mr. Head prophesied, “when you’ll find you ain’t as smart as you think you are.”

She didn’t turn on the electric light but let the darkness collect and make the room smaller and more private.

Neither one of them could say an intelligent thing and all their sentences began, “You know this boy I know well one time he…”