To Kill a Mockingbird

"The courthouse seemed to loom bigger each time I saw it."

"I shut my eyes. Judge Taylor might have seen me anyway, but Atticus didn't."

"Mrs. Dubose was the bravest person I ever knew."

"She was still on the bed, still looking straight ahead."

"The Radley House was concrete evidence of trashy surrounding."

"I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you'll go after birds."

"Maycomb is an old town, but it was on an Indian reservation before that."

"Cry about the simple hell people give each other."

"This time we aren't fighting the Yankees, we're fighting our own neighbors."

"Your father's right. Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with all superiority of training."

"Maybe we need a police force of children."

"I thought Atticus Finch would be a dead bore, but he wasn't."

"But he's innocent!"

"An' they chased him 'n' they beat him."

"I wanted to see what went on behind closed doors."

"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."

"Someday, we'll look back on this and it'll all seem funny."

"Atticus was feeble: he was nearly fifty. When Jem and I first learned that this, we had assumed that he would be indulgent, understand us, forgive us, as blind people sometimes do."

"People in their right minds never take pride in their talents."

"You've got to make the best of things the way they are."

"There's a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible."

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

"Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I've tried to live so I can look squarely back at him."

"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, that white man is trash."

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand."

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."

"Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through."

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

"Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win."

"I thought Atticus relished a courtroom the same way some people relished mint juleps."