15. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Harper Lee 1960

This is one of my favorite. A heart-warming story of Scout, Jem and Atticus Finch, a family who lives in Maycomb, Alabama at the height of racial inequality. It explores the hearts and deepest morality of all the characters in the story and effectively demonstrates the concept of truly understanding the other side of anything no matter how absurd it seems.

"We lived on the main residential street in town--Atticus, Jem and I, plus Calpurnia our cook. Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment."

"Hush your mouth! Don't matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house's yo' company, and don't let me catch you remarkin' on their ways like you was so high and mighty! You' folks might be better'n the Cunninghams but it don't count for nothin' the way you're disgracin' 'em--"

"Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. "Let's not let our imagination run away with us, dear." she said. "Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage--"

"If you can learn a simple trick Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...--until you climb into his skin and walked 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..."

"Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em... Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it. Hotheadedness isn't."

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, they don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts our for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

"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."

"I do my best to love everybody... I'm hard put, sometimes--baby, it's never an insult to be called what somebody think is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you."

"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 see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

"Jenn grinned and pushed his hair back. Just-in-your own words was Mr. Gilmer's trademark. We often wondered who else's words Mr. Gilmer was afraid his witness might employ."

"With one phrase he had turned happy picknickers into a sulky, tense, murmuring crowd, being slowly hypnotized by gavel taps lessening in intensity until the only sound in the courtroom was a dim pink-pink-pink: the judge might have been rapping the bench with a pencil."

"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal--there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal on an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court."

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