Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.

There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them.

Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him.

As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.

Don't you study about other folks's business till you take care of your own.

Things are never as bad as they seem.

There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.