Flannery O’Connor/Good Country People

‘as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other.’

‘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.’

The use of that ‘but’ is genius.

‘Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face…’

And how about this for comic timing:

Mrs Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. her name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs Hopewell was certain that she had thought  and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.’

Joy, we discover, has a PhD in philosophy. Her mother ‘picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing – how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.” These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quietly and went out of the room as if she were having a chill.’