Flannery O' Connor Knew Me

August 8, 2010 By

“She would of been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
–Flannery O’ Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Filed Under: Bookchat
About Elizabeth Scalia
  • Steve Colby

    OK, Anchoress. Now I have something else to add to my summer reading list. Thanks. :-)

  • Roberta Updegraff

    Gil Bailie has an excellent reflection on Flannery OConnor. link

  • Roberta Updegraff

    I forgot to mention he is using this short story by the amazing Flannery O’Coonor.

  • http://www.withouthavingseen.com Ryan Haber

    Dang, this is one of the best lines from one of the best pieces of one of the best authors of postmodern literature. I love “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” and I love this line.

    If we could live our lives aware of the weight of of our actions, of their consequence; aware of the judgment that will be required of them; aware of our own utter contingency and dependence upon God – what amazing saints we would be! How many sandcastles we build for ourselves – and not even in the sky, but worse, simply in our head.

    What the Hindu religion has right is to assert the contingency of all that seems so real to us.

  • http://www.withouthavingseen.com Ryan Haber

    Of course, we have that right too!

  • AvantiBev

    I think I found the solution for you Anchoress thanks to a news item posted at jihadwatch.org just today:

    The Taliban publicly flogged and then executed a pregnant Afghan widow by emptying three shots into her head for alleged adultery, police say.

    Bibi Sanubar, 35, was kept in captivity for three days before she was shot dead in a public trial on Sunday by a local Taliban commander in the Qadis district of the rural western province Badghis.

    The Taliban accused Sanubar of having an “illicit affair” that left her pregnant.

    She was first punished with 200 lashes in public before being shot, deputy provincial police chief Ghulam Mohammad Sayeedi told AFP on Monday.

    “She was shot in the head in public while she was still pregnant,” Sayeedi said….

    The radical Islamists staged public stonings or lashings of those found to have committed adultery or sex outside marriage.

    The then-Taliban government would also chop off the hands and feet of those accused of theft and robbery.
    …in accord with Qur’an 5:38.

    Yep poor Bibi had the religion of peace find a way for her to be good…good and dead.

  • F

    Yup. And they are getting their hateful mosque on ground zero too. Then they’ll want sharia law here.

    Great line from FO’C, Anchoress.

  • Roberta Updegraff

    Flannery O’Connor puts 80 grit sand paper to our polished sensibilities.

    I hated her writing in college (pinnacle years of my perfection as a thinker–or so I thought), but it still rubs me raw today.

    I own the perfect blue dot dress of Christian sainthood–if only I hadn’t chosen that hat! Or did I?

  • mrp

    Anchoress, have you read Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr.? The current paperback edition even has a forward by Herman Wouk.

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  • okonkwosyams

    I remember completinging that story for the first time. I remember silence and tears.

  • Sal

    I remember silence and chills. And the realization that we all have a very big decision to make.

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