To Kill a Mockingbird Quotes - Page 4 | Just Great DataBase

It ain't time to worry yet. I'll let you know when.

You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but do one thing for me if you will: you just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat.Try fighting with your head for a change . . .it's a good one, even if it does resist learning.

I do my best to love everybody...I'm hard put,sometimes- baby,its never an insult o be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is,it doesn't hurt you.

With him, life was routine, without him, life was unbearable. I stayed miserable for two days.

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

She was born in the Objective case.

About your writing with you left hand, are you ambidextrous, Mr. Ewell?""I most positively am not, I can use one hand good as the other. One hand good as the other.

There was nowhere to go, but I turned to go and met Atticus's vest front. I buried my head in it and listened to the small internal noises that went on behind the light blue cloth: his watch ticking, the faint crackle of his starched shirt, the soft sound of his breathing.'Your stomach's growling,' I said.'I know it,' he said.

An' they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those thing... Atticus, he was real nice..""Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.

but sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down...

Cecil Jacobs is a big wet hen!

We’re so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we’ve got men like Atticus to go for us.

How could they do it, how could they?''I don't know, but they did it.They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do - seems that only children weep

Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves.

Nobody knew what form of intimidation Mr. Radley employed to keep Boo out of sight, but Jem figured that Mr. Radley kept him chained to the bed most of the time. Atticus said no, it wasn't that sort of thing, that there were other ways of making people into ghosts.

So far nothing in your life has interfered with your reasoning process.

Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were bloodstained - if you ate animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.

I was more at home in my father's world. People like Mr. Heck Tate did not trap you with innocent questions to make fun of you; even Jem was not highly critical unless you said something stupid. Ladies seemed to live in faint horror of men, seemed unwilling to approve wholeheartedly of them. But I liked them. There was something about them, no matter how much they cussed and drank and gambled and chewed; no matter how undelectable they were, there was something about them that I instinctively liked... they weren't—"Hypocrites, Mrs. Perkins, born hypocrites," Mrs. Merriweather was saying.

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

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. 

Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets --

Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies - Scout

See there, Heck? Thank you from the bottom of my heart, but I don’t want my boy starting out with something like this over his head. Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open. Let the county come and bring sandwiches. I don’t want him growing up with a whisper about him, I don’t want anybody saying, ‘Jem Finch . . . his daddy paid a mint to get him out of that.’ Sooner we get this over with the better. Mr. Finch, Mr. Tate said stolidly, Bob Ewell fell on his knife. He killed himself.

I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man.

Lawyers, I suppose were once children, too

Scout: Why are you entrusting us your deepest secret?Mr. Raymond: Because you’re children and you can understand it.

She's an old lady and she's ill. You just hold your head high and be a gentleman. Whatever she says to you, it's your job not to let her make you mad.

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it.

I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes awoman to do that kind of work.

And for goodness' sake put some of the county back where it belongs, the soil erosion's bad enough as it is." Dill stared at my father's retreating figure."He's trying tryin' to be funny," I said.

Jen and I were accustomed to our father's last-will-and-testament diction, and were at times free to interrupt Atticus for a translation when it was beyond our understanding.

He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of gray house with sad brown doors.

Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions.

Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.

She was the bravest person I ever knew.

No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change

but you see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that’s the way I want to live.

I never understood her preoccupation with heredity. Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

Dill if you don't hush I'll knock you bowlegged.

Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.

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.

The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does. So if spitting in my face and threatening me saved Mayella Ewell one extra beating, that's something I'll gladly take. He had to take it out on somebody and I'd rather it be me than that houseful of children out there.

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.

I could think of nothing else to say to her. In fact I could never think of anything to say to her, and I sat thinking of past painful conversations between us: How are you, Jean Louise? Fine, thank you ma'am, how are you? Very well, thank you; what have you been doing with yourself? Nothin'. Don't you do anything? Nome. Certainly you have friends? Yessum. Well what do you all do? Nothin'.

When the three of us came to her house, Atticus would sweep off his hat, wave gallantly to her and say, Good evening, Mrs. Dubose! You look like a picture this evening. I never heard Atticus say like a picture of what. He would tell her the courthouse news, and would say he hoped with all his heart she’d have a good day tomorrow. He would return his hat to his head, swing me to his shoulders in her very presence, and we would go home in the twilight. 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.

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. That boy's yo' comp'ny and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear?

Had her conduct been more friendly toward me, I would have felt sorry for her. She was a pretty little thing.

That's what I thought, too,' he said at last, 'when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time . . . it's because he wants to stay inside.

Well how do you know we ain’t Negroes?Uncle Jack Finch says we really don’t know. He says as far as he can trace back the Finches we ain’t, but for all he knows we mighta come straight out of Ethiopia durin’ the Old Testament.Well if we came out durin’ the Old Testament it’s too long ago to matter.That’s what I thought, said Jem, but around here once you have a drop of Negro blood, that makes you all black.