“There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
Maudie Atkinson: “Stephanie Crawford even told me once she woke up in the middle of the night and found him [Boo Radley] looking in the window at her. I said what did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him? That shut her up a while.”
“‘Do you defend niggers, Atticus?’ I asked him that evening.
“‘Of course I do. Don’t say nigger, Scout. That’s common.’
“‘’s what everybody at school says.’
“‘From now on it’ll be everybody less one—’
“‘Well if you don’t want me to grow up talkin’ that way, why do you send me to school?’”
“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.”
“Our father didn’t do anything. He worked in an office, not in a drugstore. Atticus did not drive a dump-truck for the county, he was not the sheriff, he did not farm, work in a garage, or do anything that could possibly arouse the admiration of anyone.”
“To all parties present and participating in the life of the county, Aunt Alexandra was one of the last of her kind: she had river-boat, boarding-school manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was born in the objective case; she was an incurable gossip. When Aunt Alexandra went to school, self-doubt could not be found in any textbook, so she knew not its meaning. She was never bored, and given the slightest chance she would exercise her royal prerogative: she would arrange, advise, caution, and warn.”
“Refreshed by food, Dill recited this narrative: having been bound in chains and left to die in the basement (there were basements in Meridian) by his new father, who disliked him, and secretly kept alive on raw field peas by a passing farmer who heard his cries for help (the good man poked a bushel pod by pod through the ventilator), Dill worked himself free by pulling the chains from the wall. Still in wrist manacles, he wandered two miles out of Meridian where he discovered a small animal show and was immediately engaged to wash the camel. He traveled with the show all over Mississippi until his infallible sense of direction told him he was in Abbott County, Alabama, just across the river from Maycomb. He walked the rest of the way.
“‘How’d you get here?’ asked Jem.”
“‘You’ve got everything to lose from this, Atticus. I mean everything.’
“‘Do you really think so?’
“This was Atticus’s dangerous question. ‘Do you really think you want to move there, Scout?’ Bam, bam, bam, and the checkerboard was swept clean of my men. ‘Do you really think that, son? Then read this.’ Jem would struggle the rest of an evening through the speeches of Henry W. Grady.”
“‘Lemme tell you somethin’ now, Billy,’ a third said, ‘you know the court appointed him to defend this nigger.’
“‘Yeah, but Atticus aims to defend him. That’s what I don’t like about it.’"
“‘Dill, you’ve got to stop goin’ off without tellin’ her [Dill’s aunt],’ said Jem. ‘It just aggravates her.’
“Dill sighed patiently. ‘I told her till I was blue in the face where I was goin’—she’s just seein’ too many snakes in the closet. But that woman drinks a pint for breakfast every morning—know she drinks two glasses full. Seen her.’
“‘Don’t talk like that, Dill,’ said Aunt Alexandra. ‘It’s not becoming to a child. It’s—cynical.’
“‘I ain’t cynical, Miss Alexandra. Tellin’ the truth’s not cynical, is it?’
“‘The way you tell it, it is.’"
“Mr. Ewell was a veteran of an obscure war; that plus Atticus’s peaceful reaction probably prompted him to inquire, ‘Too proud to fight, you nigger-lovin’ bastard?’ Miss Stephanie said Atticus said, ‘No, too old,’ put his hands in his pockets and strolled on. Miss Stephanie said you had to hand it to Atticus Finch, he could be right dry sometimes.”
Atticus: “The older you grow the more of it you’ll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”
Jem: “There’s four kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind like us and the neighbours, there’s the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes…. The thing about it is, our kind of folks don’t like the Cunninghams, the Cunninghams don’t like the Ewells, and the Ewells hate and despise the colored folks…. You know, I’ve seen Atticus pat his foot when there’s fiddlin’ on the radio, and he loves pot liquor better’n any man I ever saw… but we’re still different somehow. Atticus said one reason Aunty’s so hipped on the family is because all we’ve got’s background and not a dime to our names…. I think it’s how long your family’s been readin’ and writin’…. Imagine Aunty being proud her great-grandaddy could read an’ write—ladies pick funny things to be proud of.”
“I was reminded of the ancient little organ in the chapel at Finch’s Landing. When I was very small, and if I had been very good during the day, Atticus would let me pump its bellows while he picked out a tune with one finger. The last note would linger as long as there was air to sustain it. Mrs. Merriweather had run out of air, I judged, and was replenishing her supply while Mrs. Farrow composed herself to speak.”
“I heard her say it’s time somebody taught ‘em a lesson, they were gettin’ way above themselves, an’ the next thing they think they can do is marry us. Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an’ then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home…”
“I learned more about the poor Mrunas’ social life from listening to Mrs. Merriweather: they had so little sense of family that the whole tribe was one big family. A child had as many fathers as there were men in the community, as many mothers as there were women. J. Grimes Everett [a missionary] was doing his utmost to change this state of affairs, and desperately needed our prayers.”
“Atticus, he was real nice…”
“Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
