Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee

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

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

“No, they just like to look strange and mysterious. When you get past all the boa feathers, every woman born in this world wants a strong man who knows her like a book, who’s not only her lover but he who keepeth Israel. Stupid, isn’t it?” “She wants a father instead of a husband, then.”

It begins by the wives being bored to death because their men are so tired from making money they don’t pay any attention to ’em. But when their wives start hollering, instead of trying to understand why, the men just go find a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. Then when they get tired of talking about themselves they go back to their wives. Everything’s rosy for a while, but the men get tired and their wives start yellin’ again and around it goes. Men in this age have turned the Other Woman into a psychiatrist’s couch, and at far less expense, too.”

“It’s just that I’m so afraid of making a mess of being married to the wrong man—the wrong kind for me, I mean. I’m no different from any other woman, and the wrong man would turn me into a screamin’ shrew in record time.”

Hell was and would always be as far as she was concerned, a lake of fire exactly the size of Maycomb, Alabama, surrounded by a brick wall two hundred feet high. Sinners were pitchforked over this wall by Satan, and they simmered throughout eternity in a sort of broth of liquid sulfur.

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

And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the Sea where it goes.

“I was afraid you’d laugh,” Henry said. “Laugh at you, Hank?” “Yeah. You seem to be half laughing at me all the time.” What could she say? How many times had she hurt his feelings? She said, “You know I’ve never been exactly tactful, but I swear to God I’ve never laughed at you, Hank. In my heart I haven’t.”

“As the cow said to the milkman on a cold morning, ‘Thank you for the warm hand.’”

She never questioned it, never thought about it, never even realized that before she made any decision of importance the reflex, “What would Atticus do?” passed through her unconscious; she never realized what made her dig in her feet and stand firm whenever she did was her father; that 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.

There was a time, long ago, when the only peaceful moments of her existence were those from the time she opened her eyes in the morning until she attained full consciousness, a matter of seconds until when finally roused she entered the day’s wakeful nightmare.

You are fascinated with yourself. 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.

We were both born here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder what you saw and heard.

I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody, not just Negroes.

But a man who has lived by truth—and you have believed in what he has lived—he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing.

In New York you are your own person. You may reach out and embrace all of Manhattan in sweet aloneness, or you can go to hell if you want to.

Blind, that’s what I am. I never opened my eyes. I never thought to look into people’s hearts, I looked only in their faces.

Dr. Finch kept his house militarily spotless, but books tended to pile up wherever he sat down, and because it was his habit to sit down anywhere he got ready, there were small stacks of books in odd places about the house that were a constant curse to his cleaning woman.

“It seems quixotic today, with jet airplanes and overdoses of Nembutal, that a man would go through a war for something so insignificant as his state.”

The remnants of that little army had children—God, how they multiplied—the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to begin with—in some cases they became horrifyingly more. They were never destroyed.

and up popped the ugliest, most shameful aspect of it all—the breed of white man who lived in open economic competition with freed Negroes.

As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.

“Don’t look down, Scout!” snapped Dr. Finch. “I told you it’s like carrying a cup of coffee. If you look at it you spill it.”

When he came to Maycomb he lost no time in making known to the parents that their children were the most ill-mannered lot he had ever seen, that vocational agriculture was all they were fit to learn, that football and basketball were a waste of time, and that he, happily, had no use for clubs and extracurricular activities because school, like life, was a business proposition.

“I’d just love being expelled.” She would. School bored her intolerably.

Seats were assigned in the library, but if one made clear one’s desire not to attend, the ranks closed; the person on the end of one’s row set the remaining chair in the hall outside and replaced it when the period was over.

Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present?

I am their blood and bones, I have dug in this ground, this is my home. But I am not their blood, the ground doesn’t care who digs it, I am a stranger at a cocktail party.

A man can appear to be a part of something not-so-good on its face, but don’t take it upon yourself to judge him unless you know his motives as well. A man can be boiling inside, but he knows a mild answer works better than showing his rage. A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.

We have a system of checks and balances and things, but when it comes down to it we don’t have much check on the Court, so who’ll bell the cat?

You love justice, all right. Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief—nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief. His cause interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work order out of disorder.

I believed in you. I looked up to you, Atticus, like I never looked up to anybody in my life and never will again.

You just try to kill their souls instead of their bodies. You just try to tell ’em, ‘Look, be good. Behave yourselves. If you’re good and mind us, you can get a lot out of life, but if you don’t mind us, we will give you nothing and take away what we’ve already given you.’

How they’re as good as they are now is a mystery to me, after a hundred years of systematic denial that they’re human.

You’ve cheated me in a way that’s inexpressible, but don’t let it worry you, because the joke is entirely on me. You’re the only person I think I’ve ever fully trusted and now I’m done for.”

If he had fought her fairly, she could have flung his words back at him, but she could not catch mercury and hold it in her hands.

My father’s something unspeakable and Uncle Jack’s like Alice in Wonderland!

He’s so busy fidgeting you don’t notice how closely he’s watching you. He’s crazy, all right, like every fox that was ever born. And he knows so much more than foxes.

Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience.

You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings—I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like all of us.

You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.”

Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level.”

“He was letting you break your icons one by one. He was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.”

“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.

I find myself becoming anxious sometimes . . . it gives me something to do with my hands.”

But the white supremacists fear reason, because they know cold reason beats them.

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

I can’t live in a place that I don’t agree with and that doesn’t agree with me.”