To+Kill+a+Mockingbird+-+Important+Quotes

Here are some of the important quotes from the novel. These are not all the important ones but give you some to go on...

Scout (Jean Louise Finch) the narrator, Chapter 1. || Scout, Chapter 2. || Atticus Finch to daughter Scout, Chapter 3. || Miss Maudie Atkinson to Scout, Chapter 5. || Miss Maudie Atkinson, Chapter 5. || Scout, Chapter 7. || Atticus Finch, Chapter 9. || Scout, Chapter 9. || Atticus Finch, Chapter 9. || Attitus Finch to daughter Scout, Chapter 10. || Miss Maudie Atkinson to Scout, Chapter 10. || Scout, Chapter 11. || Attitus Finch, Chapter 11. || Attitus Finch, Chapter 11. || Scout, Chapter 12. || Attitus Finch, Chapter 16. || Speech to the jury by Atticus Finch, Chapter 20. || Speech to the jury by Atticus Finch, Chapter 20. || Chapter 22. || Attitus Finch to son Jem Finch, Chapter 22. || Scout, Chapter 23. || Atticus Finch to his son Jem Finch, Chapter 23. || Jem Finch, Chapter 23. || Sheriff Tate, Chapter 30. || Scout, Chapter 31. ||
 * Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * You are too young to understand it ... but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of--oh, of your father.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * 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.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me - he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
 * 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.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * 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.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * 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. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">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.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">The witnesses for the state have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption - the evil assumption - that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber. Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men cannot 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.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system - that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">"I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill. "Yes, sir, a clown.... 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." "You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem. "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them." "Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks."
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">I don't know [how they could convict Tom Robinson], 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.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">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.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">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? 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.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">I'm not a very good man, sir, but I am sheriff of Maycomb County. Lived in this town all my life an' I'm goin' on forty-three years old. Know everything that's happened here since before I was born. 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, Mr. Finch. Let the dead bury the dead.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.
 * To Kill a Mockingbird**

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">To Kill a Mockingbird <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">home