I’m still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.
I do my best to love everybody.
Serving on a jury forces a man to make up his mind and declare himself about something. Men don’t like to do that. Sometimes it’s unpleasant.
A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.
Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand.
As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn’t much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.
Writing is simply something you must do. It’s rather like virtue in that it is its own reward.
I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.
Never, never, never on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don’t already know the answer to, was a tenet I absorbed with my baby food. Do it, and you’ll often get an answer you don’t want.
Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.
Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open.
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.
Don’t you study about other folks’s business till you take care of your own.
We said good-bye, and Dill went inside the house. He evidently remembered he was engaged to me, for he ran back out and kissed me swiftly in front of Jem. “Yawl write, hear?” he bawled after us.
Dill if you don’t hush I’ll knock you bowlegged.
Nothin’s real scary except in books.
Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.
That proves something- that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human.
Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.