A Good Man is Hard to Find The Grandmother Quotes

"Look at the graveyard!" the grandmother said, pointing it out. "That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation."

"Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.

"Gone With the Wind" said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha." (22-24)

The grandmother's connection to the Old South is made more direct here; apparently the family once owned a plantation. Just like naming her cat after a character in The Mikado, it seems as if the grandmother is eager to display a certain degree of cultural knowledge, appropriate to someone of her social status.

The Grandmother

Quote 11

"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!" (88)

The grandmother's first appeal to The Misfit is that he can't kill her because he must be a "good man." What's comical about it is not only that it seems insincere, but also that she directly connects being a good man to coming from "nice people," and not from "common folk." There's unabashed classism for you, and it's particularly ridiculous in this case; the shirtless Misfit and his two accomplices present everything but a picture "nice people." The grandmother's willingness to apply her own ideal of goodness to someone who so obviously doesn't fit it, doesn't reflect well on her or her idealized views.