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.

You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.

I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work.

Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a Klan... The Ku Klux's gone... It'll never come back.

I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets -

I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.