To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

• “Naw, Jem. I think that there is just one kind of folks. Folks." Jem turned and punched his pillow. When he settled back his face was cloudy. He was going in to one of his declines, and I grew wary. His brows came together; his mouth became a thin line. He was silent for a while. "That is what I thought, too," he said at last, "when I was your age. If there is just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go ut of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I am beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley stayed shut up in the house all this time...it's because he wants to stay inside.”
• “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... 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.”
• "Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an' then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home?"
• “Atticus, he was real nice." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
• “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
• “They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but 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.”
• “You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat. Try fightin' with your head for a change."
• “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.”
• “We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.”
• “'I don't want to hear any words like that while I'm here. Scout, you'll get in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You want to grow up to be a lady, don't you?' I said not particularly.”
• “So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... 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."
• “Dill?" "Mm?" "Why do you reckon Boo Radley's never run off?". Dill sighed a long sigh and turned away from me. "Maybe he doesn't have anywhere to run off to."
• "Do you defend niggers, Atticus?" I asked him that evening. "Of course I do. Don't say nigger, Scout. That's common." "'s what everybody at school says." "From now on it'll be everybody less one."
• “Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It's knowing you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
• “Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?”
• “Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”
• “He jerked his head at Dill: 'Things haven't caught up with that one's instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won't get sick and cry. Maybe things'll strike him as being not quite right, say, but he won't cry, not when he gets a few years on him.' 'Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?' Dill's maleness was beginning to assert itself. 'Cry about the simple hell people give each other- without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people too. A reflection on the innocence and vulnerability of children.”
• “I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.”
• “There's some folks who don't eat like us," she whispered fiercely, "but you ain't called on to contradict 'em at the table when they don't. That boy's yo' comp'ny and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear?”
• “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.”
• “...but you see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that’s the way I want to live.”
• “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.”
• "No, the answer is she knows I know she tries. That's what makes the difference.”
• “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”