To Kill a Mockingbird (To Kill a Mockingbird, #1)

by Harper Lee

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.

Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

It was clear enough to the rest of us: Walter Cunningham was sitting there lying his head off. He didn’t forget his lunch, he didn’t have any. He had none today nor would he have any tomorrow or the next day. He had probably never seen three quarters together at the same time in his life.

Jem suddenly grinned at him. “Come on home to dinner with us, Walter,” he said. “We’d be glad to have you.”

By the time we reached our front steps Walter had forgotten he was a Cunningham.

“Hush your mouth! Don’t matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house’s yo’ comp’ny, and don’t you let me catch you remarkin’ on their ways like you was so high and mighty! Yo’ folks might be better’n the Cunninghams but it don’t count for nothin’ the way you’re disgracin’ ’em—if you can’t act fit to eat at the table you can just set here and eat in the kitchen!”

but the prospect of spending nine months refraining from reading and writing made me think of running away.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—” “Sir?” “—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

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.”

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

Talking to Francis gave me the sensation of settling slowly to the bottom of the ocean. He was the most boring child I ever met.

But I never figured out how Atticus knew I was listening, and it was not until many years later that I realized he wanted me to hear every word he said.

He did not do the things our schoolmates’ fathers did: he never went hunting, he did not play poker or fish or drink or smoke. He sat in the livingroom and read.

Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

“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.”

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents,” said Miss Maudie.

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.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

Dill concluded by saying he would love me forever and not to worry, he would come get me and marry me as soon as he got enough money together, so please write.

With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.

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.

“He just said we would. We never did.”

From a different direction, another voice cut crisply through the night: “You’re damn tootin’ they won’t. Had you covered all the time, Atticus.” Mr. Underwood and a double-barreled shotgun were leaning out his window above The Maycomb Tribune office.

“I don’t know of any law that says they can’t talk. Maybe if we didn’t give them so much to talk about they’d be quiet.

“That proves something—that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children . . . you children last night made Walter Cunningham stand in my shoes for a minute. That was enough.”

“They don’t belong anywhere. Colored folks won’t have ’em because they’re half white; white folks won’t have ’em ’cause they’re colored, so they’re just in-betweens, don’t belong anywhere.

“Scared of arrest, scared you’d have to face up to what you did?” “No suh, scared I’d hafta face up to what I didn’t do.”

“I don’t care one speck. It ain’t right, somehow it ain’t right to do ’em that way. Hasn’t anybody got any business talkin’ like that—it just makes me sick.”

“Cry about the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people, too.”

You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women—black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men. There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.”

A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I

The older you grow the more of it you’ll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. 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.”

Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case.

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.