To Kill a Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

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.

“You are too young to understand it,” she said, “but sometimes the Bible in the

hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father.”

There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

“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.”

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.”

her—I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.

“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 it—seems that only children weep.

“There ain’t one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I’m gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.”

As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”