Quotes from book

To Kill a Mockingbird

“Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'.”

“You can pet him, Mr. Arthur. He's asleep…”

“I'm Charles Baker Harris… I can read”

“You see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that's the way I want to live.”

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another.”

“One must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.”

“I came to the conclusion that people were just peculiar, I withdrew from them, and never thought about them until I was forced to.”

“Nothin’s real scary except in books.”

“See there?" Jem was scowling triumphantly. "Nothin' to it. I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl its mortifyin”

“Dill?"
Mm?"
Why do you reckon Boo Radleys never run off?"
Dill sighed a long sigh and turned away from me.
Maybe he doesn't have anywhere to run off to”

“…reasonable men, they went because we were there. There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried.”

“So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses…. That proves something — that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.”

“The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me — he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”

“…before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.”

“Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.”

“Well if you don’t want me to grow up talkin‘ that way, why do you send me to school?”

“From now on it’ll be everybody less one”

“When the new wore off his grandfather’s watch, and carrying it became a day’s burdensome task, Jem no longer felt the necessity of ascertaining the hour every five minutes.”

“Apparently, Mayella's recital had given her confidence, but it was not her father's brash kind: there was something stealthy about hers, like a steady-eyed cat with a twitchy tail.”