Men tend to carry their honesty in pigeonholes. They can be perfectly honest in some ways and fool themselves in other ways.
What do you want me to do, go shout from the housetops that I am Henry Clinton and I'm here to tell you you're all wet?
A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.
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.
The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman, had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.
Never, never, never, on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to, was a tenet I absorbed with my baby-food. Do it, and you'll often get an answer you don't want, an answer that might wreck your case.
I'm no different from any other woman, and the wrong man would turn me into a screamin' shrew in record time.
You're no better. You're no damn better. You just try to kill their souls instead of their bodies.
Sherlock Holmes and Jem Finch would agree.
Dill and Jem emerged from a brief huddle: If you stay you've got to do what we tell you, Dill warned. We-ll, I said, who's so high and mighty all of a sudden? If you don't say you'll do what we tell you, we ain't gonna tell you anything, Dill continued.
Before she dozed off, it occurred to her that for the first time in her life Calpurnia had said Yes ma'am and Miss Scout to her, forms of address usually reserved for the presence of high company.
The remainder of the afternoon went by in the gentle gloom that descends when relatives appear . . .
Besides, nothin's real scary except in books. Atticus.
There's some folks who don't eat like us, she whispered fiercely, but you ain't called on to contradict 'em at the table when they don't.
Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
You are using frightful means to justify ends that you think are for the good of the most people. Your ends may well be right—I think I believe in the same ends—but you cannot use people as your pawns, Atticus. You cannot.
That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.
Jean Louise was accustomed to her uncle's brand of intellectual shorthand: it was his custom to state one or two isolated facts, and a conclusion seemingly unsupported thereby. Slowly and surely, if prodded correctly, Dr. Finch would unwind the reel of his strange lore to reveal reasoning that glittered with a private light of its own.
The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they can't scare us with the essential inferiority line, they'll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that's the only thing they know is feared in our fundamentalist hearts down here.
Atticus said to Jem one day, I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Integrity, humor, and patience were the three words for Atticus Finch.
What on earth could Ewell do to me, sister? Something furtive, Aunt Alexandra said. You may count on that. Nobody has much chance to be furtive in Maycomb, Atticus answered.
Well then, how do you explain why the Cunninghams are different? Mr. Walter can hardly sign his name, I've seen him. We've just been readin' and writing' longer'n they have.
That her son had developed all the latent characteristics of a three-dollar bill escaped her notice—all she knew was that she was glad he lived in Birmingham because he was oppressively devoted to her, which meant that she felt obliged to make an effort to reciprocate, which she could not with any spontaneity do.
Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.
Ieders eiland, Jean Louise, ieders wachter, is zijn geweten. Een collectief geweten bestaat niet.
When you live in New York, you often have the feeling that New York’s not the world. I mean this: every time I come home, I feel like I’m coming back to the world, and when I leave Maycomb it’s like leaving the world.
These top-water nigger preachers . . . like apes . . . mouths like Number 2 cans . . . twist the Gospel . . . the court prefers to listen to Communists . . . take 'em all out and shoot 'em for treason . . . Against.
Asked him and he said he wasn't. Besides, nothin's real scary except on books.
Jem, see if you can stand in Bob Ewell's shoes a minute. I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does.
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.
He so nearly understood. I'll marry you, Hank, if you bring me to live here at the Landing. I'll swap New York for this place but not for Maycomb.
Stephanie Crawford even told me once she woke up in the middle of the night and found him looking in the window at her. I said what did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him? That shut her up for a while.
He was letting you break your icons one by one. he was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.
Atticus, are we going to win it? No, honey. Then, why— Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win, Atticus said.
Summer, and he watches his children's heart break. Autumn again and Boo's children needed him. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.
He never counted what it cost him; he never looked back.
They had never been able to sustain fifteen minutes' conversation with one another without advancing irreconcilable points of view, invigorating in friendships, but in close blood relations producing only uneasy cordiality.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another they are Communists.
Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'.
Had I ever harbored the mystical notions about mountains that seem to obsess lawyers and judges, Aunt Alexandra would have been analogous to Mount Everest: throughout my early life, she was cold and there.
How'd you like for her to come live with us? I said I would like it very much, which was a lie, but one must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.
Well, in the first place, you stopped to gimme a chance to tell you my side of it- you just lit right into me. When Jem an' I fuss Atticus doesn't ever listen to just Jem's side of it, he hears mine too.
Well, did you know he's the best checker-player in this town? Why, down at the Landing when we were coming up, Atticus Finch could beat everybody on both sides of the river." "Miss Maudie, Jem and me beat him all the time." "It's about time you found out it's because he lets you. Did you know he can play a Jew's Harp?
It's always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you'll get along.
Nothin's real scary except in books.
Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.
Melbourne said I'll put it in my own words: the time your friends need you is when they're wrong, Jean Louise. They don't need you when they're right— What.
Nowadays he's got more than he ever had in his life, he has everything but breeding, he's freed himself from every stigma, but he sits nursing his hangover of hatred. . .
