Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee

Her favorite game was golf because its essential principles consisted of a stick, a small ball, and a state of mind.

She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person.

She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way.

“Aunty,” she said, cordially, “why don’t you go pee in your hat?”

“I just don’t like my world disturbed without some warning.

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. It’s silly. I can’t explain it, and what makes it sillier is that I’d go stark raving living in Maycomb.”

You seem to be half laughing at me all the time.”

He never counted what it cost him; he never looked back.

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.

Even his enemies loved him, because Atticus never acknowledged that they were his enemies. He was never a rich man, but he was the richest man his children ever knew.

It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing, keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess.

she developed a halfway interest in clothes, boys, hairdos, gossip, and female aspirations; but she was uneasy all the time she was away from the security of those who she knew loved her.

whatever was decent and of good report in her character was put there by her father; she did not know that she worshiped him.

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.

All of Maycomb and Maycomb County were leaving her as the hours passed, and she automatically blamed herself.

Why is it that everything I have ever loved on this earth has gone away from me in two days’ time?

We’ve been good to ’em, we’ve bailed ’em out of jail and out of debt since the beginning of time, we’ve made work for ’em when there was no work, we’ve encouraged ’em to better themselves, they’ve gotten civilized, but my dear—that veneer of civilization’s so thin that a bunch of uppity Yankee Negroes can shatter a hundred years’ progress in five….

Hester laughed. “And I thought we’d have some excitement.” Jean Louise’s scalp jumped. I guess I’m losing my sense of humor, maybe that’s what it is.

You will say anything that occurs to you, but what I can’t understand are the things that do occur to you. I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth.