Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee

But few people took advantage of the roads, and why should they? If you did not want much, there was plenty.

Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her.

She was almost in love with him. No, that’s impossible, she thought: either you are or you aren’t. Love’s the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it’s a you-do or you-don’t proposition with them all.

Alexandra saw what Maycomb saw: Maycomb expected every daughter to do her duty.

For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”

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.

Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.

Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.”

“Remember this also: 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.”

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

the time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re right—”