The world’s endin’, Atticus! Please do something – !” I dragged him to the window and pointed. “No it’s not,” he said. “It’s snowing.
Atticus Finch’s a deep reader, a mighty deep reader.
Perhaps our forefathers were wise.
Melbourne said once, that the only real duties of government were to prevent crime and preserve contracts, to which I will add one thing since I find myself reluctantly in the twentieth century: and to provide for the common defense.” “That’s a cloudy statement.” “Indeed it is. It leaves us with so much freedom.
I thought we were just people. I have no idea.
I felt the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me, and for the second time in my life I thought of running away.
Mad, mad, mad as a hatter. Well, that’s the way of all Finches. Difference between Uncle Jack and the rest of ’em, though, is he knows he’s crazy.
I breathed again. It wasn’t me, it was only Calpurnia they were talking about. Revived, I entered the livingroom. Atticus had retreated behind his newspaper and Aunt Alexandra was worrying her embroidery.
His private character was his public character.
The Radley Place was inhabited by an unknown entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell.
Jem,” I asked, “what’s a mixed child?” “Half white, half colored. You’ve seen ’em, Scout. You know that red-kinky-headed one that delivers for the drugstore. He’s half white. They’re real sad.” “Sad, how come?” “They don’t belong anywhere. Colored folks won’t have ’em because they’re half white; white folks won’t have ’em ’cause they’re colored, so they’re just in-betweens, don’t belong anywhere.
The time your friends need you is when they’re wrong Jean Louise, they don’t need you when they’re right.
Through the weeks he had cultivated an expression of polite and detached interest, which he would present to her in answer to her most blood-curdling inventions.
Atticus asked quickly, “How did you leave the big city?
And I thought to myself, well, we’re making.
A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer.
Dill’s eyes flickered at Jem, and Jem looked at the floor. Then he rose and broke the remaining code of our childhood. He went out of the room and down the hall. “Atticus,” his voice was distant, “can you come here a minute, sir?
She wished she had paid more attention to them, but only one glance down a column of print was enough to tell her a familiar story: same people who were the Invisible Empire, who hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans – trash.
Jem preached the longest, most tedious sermon she ever heard in her life. He said that sin was about the most sinful thing he could think of, and no one who sinned could be a success, and blessed was he who sat in the seat of the scornful; in short, he repeated his own version of everything they had heard for the past three nights.
A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked.