Atticus said if I paid no attention to him, Jem would come down. Atticus was right.
It takes two races to mongrelize a race – if that’s the right word – and when we white people holler about mongrelizin’, isn’t that something of a reflection on ourselves as a race?
It takes considerable getting used to. I hated it for two years. It intimidated me daily until one morning when someone pushed me on a bus and I pushed back. After I pushed back I realized I’d become a part of it.
An old campaigner, he did not speak until we were on the sidewalk. “What’s up?” “Jem’s got the look-arounds,” an affliction Calpurnia said all boys caught at his age.
Never, never, never, on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don’t already know the answer to.
The novel must tell a story.
I think maybe he put his gun down when he realized that God had given him an unfair advantage over most living things.
After all, if Aunty could be a lady at a time like this, so could I.
Cecil Jacobs, who lived at the far end of our street next door to the post office, walked a total of one mile per school day to avoid the Radley Place and old Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose. Mrs. Dubose lived two doors up the street from us; neighborhood opinion was unanimous that Mrs. Dubose was the meanest old woman who ever lived. Jem wouldn’t go by her place without Atticus beside him.
There’s four kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there’s the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the.
First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.” She smiled brilliantly and said, “Hank, I agree with everything you’ve said. You are the most perspicacious individual I’ve met in years, you are six feet five, and may I light your cigarette? How’s that?
Men tend to carry their honesty in pigeonholes, Jean Louise. They can be perfectly honest in some ways and fool themselves in other ways.
Well, Indian-heads – well, they come from the Indians. They’re real strong magic, they make you have good luck.
Besides making change in the collection plate every Sunday, Mr. Avery sat on the porch every night until nine o’clock and sneezed.
Yes. I’ll accept being called a snob when it comes to government. I’d like very much to be left alone to manage my own affairs in a live-and-let-live economy, I’d like for my state to be left alone to keep house without advice from the NAACP, which knows next to nothing about its business and cares less. That organization has stirred up more trouble in the past five years –.
I remember that rape case you defended, but I missed the point. You love justice, all right. Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief – nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief. His cause interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work order out of disorder. It’s a compulsion with you, and now it’s coming home to you –.
There ain’t one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I’m gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.
He was prodding her. Let him. They were on safe ground. “Well, in trying to satisfy one amendment, it looks like they rubbed out another one. The Tenth. It’s only a small amendment, only one sentence long, but it seemed to be the one that meant the most, somehow.
When you happened along and saw him doing something that seemed to you to be the very antithesis of his conscience-your conscience-you literally could not stand it. It made you physically ill. Life became hell on earth for you. You had to kill yourself, or he had to kill you to get you functioning as a separate entity.
I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me. You cheated me, you’ve driven me out of my home and now I’m in a no-man’s-land but good – there’s no place for me any more in Maycomb, and I’ll never be entirely at home anywhere else.” Her.