When you're at the top, there's only one way to go.

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

Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'.

Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.

I could think of nothing else to say to her. In fact I could never think of anything to say to her, and I sat thinking of past painful conversations between us: How are you, Jean Louise? Fine, thank you ma'am, how are you? Very well, thank you; what have you been doing with yourself? Nothin'. Don't you do anything? Nome. Certainly you have friends? Yessum. Well what do you all do? Nothin'.

I think I'll be a clown when I get grown,' said Dill. Jem and I stopped in our tracks. Yes sir, a clown,' he said. '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.