To Kill a Mockingbird Quotes
As I opened the front screen door Atticus said, "By the way, Scout, you'd better not say anything at school about our agreement."
"I'm afraid our activities would be received with considerable disapprobation by the more learned authorities."
Jem and I were accustomed to our father's last-will-and-testament diction, and we were at all times free to interrupt Atticus for a translation when it was beyond our understanding.
"Huh, sir?"
"I never went to school," he said, "but I have a feeling that if you tell Miss Caroline we read every night she'll get after me, and I wouldn't want her after me."
– Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 3. Atticus has a unique and untypical parenting approach which sets him apart from the other characters in the story. It is a very admirable one in which he shows respect for his children and engages with them as equals. He chooses to treat them as individuals and speak to them in an adult-like way.
Two live oaks stood at the end of the Radley lot; their roots reached into the side-road and made it bumpy. Something about one of the trees attracted my attention.
Some tinfoil was sticking out of a knot-hole just above my eye level, winking at me in the afternoon sun. I stood on my tiptoe, hastily looked around once more, reached into the hole, and withdrew two pieces of chewing gum minus their outer wrappers.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 4. The Radley tree symbolizes community. The roots are reaching out and symbolize how the reclusive Boo is trying to reach out and be friendly towards the children. He tries to connect with Jem and Scout by leaving gifts for then in the tree. Boo's gifts foreshadow how he will later be seen as a symbol of goodness and courage and not the frightening, reclusive monster he is depicted to be early on in the story.
Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 4. Scout here captures all the joys of summer and the excitement of being with their summertime friend Dill.
We ran home, and on the front porch we looked at a small box patchworked with bits of tinfoil collected from chewing-gum wrappers. It was the kind of box wedding rings came in, purple velvet with a minute catch. Jem flicked open the tiny catch. Inside were two scrubbed and polished pennies, one on top of the other.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 4. Despite the nasty gossip about him, Boo Radley is a kind and gentle person. He leaves the children gifts. The care with which he constructs the box shows how much he cares for Jem and Scout. This foreshadows his emergence in the minds of people later on as a kind, loving person as opposed to the scary monster that he is depicted as in the early part of the story.
Dill's father was taller than ours, he had a black beard (pointed), and was president of the L & N Railroad.
"I helped the engineer for a while," said Dill, yawning.
"In a pig's ear you did, Dill. Hush," said Jem. "What'll we play today?"
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 4. Dill Harris telling tall tales about his father to Scout and Jem, who doesn't believe a word Dill.
As the summer progressed, so did our game. We polished and perfected it, added dialogue and plot until we had manufactured a small play upon which we rang changes every day.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 4. Scout describes how one of the ways the children dealt with their fear of Boo Radley was to make up a game called "Boo Radley" and play it. It's drawn from neighborhood gossip about Boo.
"See there?" Jem was scowling triumphantly. "Nothin' to it. I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl it's mortifyin'."
There was more to it than he knew, but I decided not to tell him.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 4. Jem attacks Scout's gender and insults her about acting like a girl whenever he feels she challenges his manhood. In this instance the tire he was pushing her in rolls into Radley's yard and she makes him retrieve it. What she didn't tell him was that she heard laughter coming from the Radley home. Boo is obviously inside watching them play, this foreshadows the important role he will have in the children's lives.
I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that's why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 4. Scout talks about her femininity, believing that being a girl is bad and being a boy is good. Her brother Jem reinforces this, to him being a girl is not a positive thing.
Through all the head-shaking, quelling of nausea and Jem-yelling, I had heard another sound, so low I could not have heard it from the sidewalk. Someone inside the house was laughing.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 4. Scout lands at the bottom of the Radley's front steps when a tire she is inside rolls into their yard. She hears laughter coming from the house. It can only have been Boo Radley. He is watching the children, this signals how he will later make an critical intervention in their lives.
Dill was becoming something of a trial anyway, following Jem about. He had asked me earlier in the summer to marry him, then he promptly forgot about it…said I was the only girl he would ever love, then he neglected me. I beat him up twice but it did no good, he only grew closer to Jem. They spent days together in the treehouse plotting and planning, calling me only when they needed a third party.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. As one friendship goes into decline – that of Scout and Dill – another one is born – Dill and Jem.
Our tacit treaty with Miss Maudie was that we could play on her lawn, eat her scuppernongs if we didn't jump on the arbor, and explore her vast back lot, terms so generous we seldom spoke to her, so careful were we to preserve the delicate balance of our relationship, but Jem and Dill drove me closer to her with their behavior.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Scout tells of the friendly relationship she and Jem have with neighbor Miss Maudie. Miss Maudie cares for them, inviting them to play in her garden and baking cakes for them to eat.
She was a widow, a chameleon lady, who work in her flower beds in an old straw hat and men's coveralls, but after her five o'clock bath she would appear on the porch and reign over the street in magisterial beauty.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Scout describes Miss Maudie in glowing and dignified terms.
Miss Maudie hated her house: time spent indoors was time wasted…She loved everything that grew in God's earth, even the weeds.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Miss Maudie thought that any time spent in doors was time wasted. She preferred to be gardening and out in nature.
Her speech was crisp for a Maycomb County inhabitant. She called us by all our names, and when she grinned she revealed two minute gold prongs clipped to her eyeteeth. When I admired them and hoped I would have some eventually, she said, "Look here." With a click of her tongue she thrust out her bridgework, a gesture of cordiality that cemented our friendship.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Scout likes the fact that neighbor Miss Maudie calls the children by their names and treats them with respect. Scout is very impressed that Miss Maudie can remove her partial denture and this helps to cement their friendship.
Every time she baked she made a big cake and three little ones, and she would call across the street: "Jem Finch, Scout Finch, Charles Baker Harris, come here!" Our promptness was always rewarded.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Miss Maudie is one of the most thoughtful and sensitive people in the novel. As part of her benevolence she baked cakes for the children.
We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Maude would yell back, "Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they'll hear you the post office, I haven't heard you yet!" Jem and I thought this a strange way to ask for a lady's hand in marriage, but then again Uncle Jack was rather strange.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Uncle Jack and Miss Maudie had known one another since they were childen and liked to tease each other. He by shouting a marriage proposal to her at Christmas, she by yelling back loudly in a bid to embarrass him.
He said he was trying to get Miss Maudie's goat, that he had been trying unsuccessfully for forty years, that he was the last person in the world that Miss Maudie would think about marrying but the first person she thought about teasing.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Uncle Jack and Miss Maudie had no intention of marrying each other, but they engaged in a playful, teasing banter about it.
Jem and I had considerable faith in Miss Maudie. She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. She was our friend.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Scout is appreciative of Miss Maudie's friendship.
In Bible
"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, Chapter 5. Miss Maudie Atkinson to Scout. She is suggesting that sometimes religion in the hands of the wrong person can do more harm than a whiskey bottle in the hands of a good man such as Scout's father Atticus.
"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, Chapter 5. Miss Maudie Atkinson to Scout about religious fanatacism. She is talking about Boo Radley's father and his foot-washing Baptists who consider any type of pleasure to be a sin and even criticize Maudie for working in her garden to make it pretty. The hypocrisy of being outwardly religious but not showing compassion is one of the novel's themes.
"Stephanie Crawford even told me she woke up in the middle of the night and found him looking in the window at her. I said what did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him? That shut her up a while."
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Miss Maudie provides Scout with an example of some of the gossip that is spread about Boo Radley. Especially by Stephanie Crawford, a fountain of unfounded rumors about the Radley family. Miss Maudie thinks her words are ridiculous. Scout points out that Stephanie Crawford goes about the neighborhood "doing good," which makes her rather hypocritical.
"No, child," she said, "that is a sad house. I remember Arthur Radley when he was a boy. He always spoke nicely to me, no matter what folks said he did. Spoke as nicely as he knew how."
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Miss Maudie to Scout. Just like Atticus, Miss Maudie makes up her own mind about people based on the facts, rather than listening to gossip, which in the case of Boo Radley is wildly exaggerated.
"The things that happen to people we will never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets – "
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Miss Maudie to Scout. She tries to explain how the reclusive Boo Radley feels after being secluded in the house for so long. Boo was locked up in his childhood home by his abusive father, who hypocritically in public was religious and "a foot-washing Baptist." Boo is viewed as a strange and frightening figure by the children.
"Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets."
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Atticus's longtime friend Miss Maudie tells Scout that about one of the things she admires about her father. She is making the point that Atticus always acts the same way whether other people can see him or not. He is the same on the street as he is in the house. One of those constantly authentic people who has nothing to hide, there is nothing fake or two-faced about him, what you see is what you get. He stands out in stark contrast to some of the people in Maycomb who practice hypocrisy.
Dill said, "We're askin' him real politely to come out sometimes, and tell us what he does in there – we said we wouldn't hurt him and we'd buy him an ice cream."
"You all've gone crazy, he'll kill us!"
Dill said, "It's my idea. I figure if he'd come out and sit a spell with us he might feel better."
"How do you know he don't feel good?"
"Well how'd you feel if you'd been shut up for a hundred years with nothin' but cats to eat? I bet he's for a beard down to here – "
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Dill and Jem cook up a plan to drop a note into Boo Radley's window with a fishing pole to get him to come out. Dill expresses some sympathy for Boo being shut up in his house for so long, while Scout is terrified Boo will kill them. The reclusive Boo is a victim of prejudice in Maycomb, and in the minds of children like Jem he is a figure of fear.
"So that's what you were doing, wasn't it?"
"Makin' fun of him?"
"No," said Atticus, "Putting his life's history on display for the edification of the neighborhood."
Jem seemed to swell a little. "I didn't say we were doin' that, I didn't say it!"
Atticus grinned dryly. "You just told me," he said. "You stop this nonsense right now, every one of you."
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Atticus, who is not often severe with his childen, has strong words when he catches them and Dill playing a game called "Boo Radley." He makes clear that the Radleys are people and are not to be made fun of.
"I thought I wanted to be a lawyer but I ain't so sure now!"
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 5. Jem shouts this when he knows Atticus can't hear him. He is angry that Atticus got him to admit his guilt about making fun of Boo Radley by using a lawyer's tricks.
Then I saw the shadow. It was the shadow of a man with a hat on. At first I thought it was a tree, but there was no wind blowing, and tree trunks never walked. The back porch was bathed in moonlight, And the shadow, crisp and toast, moved across the porch towards Jem.
Dill saw it next. He put his hands to his face.
When it crossed Jem, Jem saw it. He put his arms over his head and went rigid.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 6. Scout joins Jem and Dill to invade the Radley yard at night and get a sneak look at Boo Radley through a window. When the shadow of a man walks past they get the fright of their lives and flee. Not a minute too soon, as Nathan Radley then fires off his shotgun into the air.
Because nobody could see them at night, because Atticus would be so deep in a book he wouldn't hear the Kingdom coming, because if Boo Radley killed them they'd miss school instead of vacation, and because it was easier to see inside a dark house in the dark than in the daytime, did I understand?
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 6. Jem and Dill give Scout reasons why they chose this night to steal into Radleys' yard to sneak a look at Boo through the window.
"Scout, I'm tellin' you for the last time, shut your trap or go home – I declare to the Lord you're gettin' more like a girl every day!"
With that, I had no option but to join them.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 6. Jem insults Scout's gender again, after she protests over him and Dill going to the Radley house at night because she is afraid Boo will kill them. After the insult Scout feels she has no choice but to go along. And they do all get quite a fright.