Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. (Quoted from Charles Lamb)

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

And it's certainly bad, but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. I don't know of any landowner around here who begrudges those children any game their father can hit. Of course he shouldn't, but he'll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. 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.

Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.