Scout Finch

"We lived on the main residential street of Maycomb. Our house was really an L-shaped affair."

"He had discovered during his first year in school that I knew he was watching, and had learned to leave me alone."

"I'm trying to be helpful, I'm trying to tell you something."

"Atticus had promised me he would wear me out, but he hadn't raised his hand to either of us ever in his life."

"Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence."

"Jem and I naturally assumed that instructions came in one word and one word only: No."

"I wanted to grow up and marry Charlie Harris, but I was eight and didn't know how."

"Atticus was right. One time he said you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."

"I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks."

"Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings."

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

"The things that happen to people we know are there on the Maycomb gazette from one day to the next—why, we even know about half the things in Atlanta."

"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it."

"She made me climb into her skin and walk around in it."

"Atticus's face was grave. "She's crying," I said softly."

"Atticus said that Jem was having a difficult time these days, and that it was all right to be depressed and blue sometimes—you were supposed to have an adjusting period."

"It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived."

"Atticus said the jury system was a good thing, but I didn't think so. Now I saw the real thing."

"That's when Jem and I realized that it was now our turn to cry."

"The courthouse seemed to hold its breath," I was thinking, as I watched my father walk toward the jury."

"Atticus said our simple hell-yes and hell-no of country people was just another way of talking about truth."

"Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the sweatstacked night."