Quotes

"I declare to the Lord you're getting' more like a girl every day!"

"a naturally tranquil disposition and a slow fuse".

"his shoulders jerked as if each 'guilty' was a separate stab between them"

"Atticus,' he said, Why don't people like us and Miss Maudie ever sit on juries? You never see anybody from Maycomb on a jury. They all come out in the woods.' "

"If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?' "

"If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?' "

"No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.' "

"Calpurnia was something else again. She was all angles and bones; she was nearsighted; she squinted; her hand was wide as a bed slat and twice as hard."

"She was always ordering me out of the kitchen, asking me why I couldn't behave as well as Jem when she knew he was older, and calling me home when I wasn't ready to come."

"Our battles were epic and one-sided. Calpurnia always won, mainly because Atticus always took her side. She had been with us ever since Jem was born, and I had felt her tyrannical presence as long as I could remember."

'"Baby,' said Calpurnia, 'I just can't help it if Mister Jem's growin' up. He's gonna want to be off to himself a lot now, doin' whatever boys do, so you just come right on in the kitchen when you feel lonesome. We'll find lots of things to do in here.'"

"Atticus's voice was even: 'Alexandra, Calpurnia's not leaving this house until she wants to. You may think otherwise, but I couldn't have got along without her all these years. She's a faithful member of this family and you'll simply have to accept things the way they are. Besides, sister, I don't want you working your head off for us- you've no reason to do that. We still need Cal as much as we ever did.'"

"without a speck o' trouble outa him".

"I guess Tom was tired of taking white men's chances and preferred to take his own"

"'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.'"

"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. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed."

"'There's a black boy dead for no reason, and the man responsible for it's dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time....'"

"It began the summer when Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out".

"Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were bloodstained—if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time."

"As Tom Robinson gave his testimony, it came to me that Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. She was even lonelier than Boo Radley, who had not been out of the house in twenty-five years."

"Scout, I think I’m beginning to understand something. I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all this time… it’s because he wants to stay inside.”

"Summer, and he watched his children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him."

"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 […] 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."

"I think I'll be a clown when I get grown […] 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."

"It was just him I couldn't stand," Dill said. […] "That old Mr. Gilmer doin' him thataway, talking so hateful to him—[…] It was the way he said it made me sick, plain sick. […] The way that man called him 'boy' all the time an' sneered at him, an' looked around at the jury every time he answered-[…] 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."

"Let's try to make him come out," said Dill. "I'd like to see what he looks like."

"a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies".

"I maintain that the Ewells started it all. Atticus said the Ewells had been the disgrace of Maycomb for three generations."

"Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world".

"Every town the size of Maycomb had families like the Ewells. No economic fluctuations changed their status—people like the Ewells lived as guests of the county in prosperity as well as in the depths of a depression. No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and the diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings.

'"There’s four kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there’s the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the N_groes.'"

"Are you the father of Mayella Ewell?" was the next question. "Well, if I ain't I can't do nothing about it now, her ma's dead," was the answer.

"You could see he might make a boxer, as far as width and heaviness in the shoulders went, but there was a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil."

"There was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size and attractive appearance."

"the understandable and lawful world... slipping away".

"You aren't playing the game".

"The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering"

"Cos I had some sense".

"His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without silliness"

"Out of this face stared two blue eyes, frustrated now, and turning, or ready to turn to anger."

"See? They do what I want."

"the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood"

"All you can talk about is pig, pig, pig!"

"they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will on it, taken away its life".

"******** to the rules! We're strong - we hunt!"

"We don't need the conch any more".

"The shock of black hair, down his nape and low on his forehead, seemed to suit his gloomy face and make what had seemed at first unsociable remoteness in to something foreboding."

"kept to himself with an inner intensity of avoidance and secrecy."

"carried death in his hands".

"What intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy."

"Piggy, for all his ludicrous body, had brains."

" How can you expect to be rescued if you don't put first things first and act proper"

"Piggy was an outsider, not only by accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ***-mar, and specs, and a certain disinclination to manual labour."

" I just take the conch to say this. I can't see no more and I got to get my gl***es back"

"a skinny, vivid little boy, with a glance coming up from under a hut of straight hair that hung down, black and course"

Ralph says "He's queer. He's funny." Piggy says "He's cracked".

"a secret place in a clearing full of flowers and butterflies",

"it wasn't a good island"

"You'll get back to where you came from"

"maybe there is a beast... What I mean is... maybe it's only us"

"The waves turned the corpse gently in the water. ... Softly, surrounded by a fringe of bright inquisitive creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out towards the open sea".

"Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilisation that knew nothing of him and was in ruins."

"The crowd ... leapt onto the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore."

"Percival had gone off, crying, and Johnny was left in triumphant possession of the castles."

"Roger advanced upon them as one wielding a nameless authority."

"a husky, slightly overweight longshoreman."

"the less you trust, the less you be sorry."

"a guy do a thing like that? How's he gonna show his face?"

"I guess I just never figured... that you would ever grow up."

"In the worst times […] I didn't stand around lookin' for relief – I hustled. When there was empty piers in Brooklyn I went to Hoboken, Staten Island, the West Side, Jersey, all over"

"I took out of my own mouth to give to her. […] I walked hungry plenty days in this city!"

"When am I gonna be a wife again, Eddie?"

"You want somethin' else, Eddie, and you can never have her!"

"Listen to me, I love you, I'm talkin' to you, I love you"

Eddie: Then why—Oh, B.! Beatrice: Yes, yes! Eddie: My B.!

‘BEATRICE: Eddie, for Christ’s sake its her wedding,’

"It means you gotta be your own self more."

"Eddie, I never meant to do nothing bad to you."

"I mean I know him and now I'm supposed to turn around and make a stranger out of him?"

"Why don't you talk to him, Eddie? He blesses you, and you don't talk to him hardly."

"She is at the edge of tears, as though a familiar world had shattered."

"I can tell a block away when he's blue in his mind and just wants to talk to somebody quiet and nice"

"I want to tell you now, Eddie - when you say we go, we go."

"You come home early now."

"That one! He killed my children!"

"The chair raised like a weapon over Eddie’s head"

“Animal! You go on your knees to me.”

"No, Marco, please! Eddie, please, he has children!"

"You think I would carry on my back the rest of my life a woman I didn't love just to be an American?"

"No, I - I'm tired." (rejects Catherine's offer to dance)

"But I will not let her out of my hands because I love her so much, is that right for me to do?"

"Imagine! She said they were poor!"

"You won't have a friend in the world, Eddie!"

“And watched it run its bloody course.”

“His eyes were like tunnels"

“There is too much love for the niece.”

"In Sicily, from where their fathers came, the law has not been a friendly idea since the Greeks were beaten.."

"I only came here when I was twenty-five. In those days, Al Capone, the greatest Carthaginian of all, was learning his trade on these pavements, and Frankie Yale himself was cut precisely in half by a machine-gun on the corner of Union Street, two blocks away."

"You hear? Only God makes justice.".

"The family had an uncle that they were hidin' in the house, and he snitched to the Immigration."

"He had five brothers and the old father. And they grabbed him in the kitchen and pulled him down the stairs - three flights his head was bouncin' like a coconut. And they spit on him in the street, his own father and his brothers. The whole neighbourhood was crying."

"Marco's got my name - and you run tell him, kid, that he's gonna give it back to me in front of this neighbourhood, or we have it out.