Harper Lee

To reach the courtroom, on the second floor, one passed sundry sunless county cubbyholes: the tax assessor,... the circuit clerk, the judge of probate lived in cool dim hutches that smelled […]

Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

Atticus killed the engine in the driveway and coasted to the carhouse

Jem picked up a rock and threw it jubilantly at the car-house

He said Atticus was still touchous about us and the Radleys and it wouldn't do to push him any.

Maycomb was an ancient town. It was twenty miles east of Finch’s Landing, awkwardly inland for such an old town. But Maycomb would have been closer to the river had it not been for the nimble-wittedness of one Sinkfield, who in the dawn of history operated an inn where two pig-trails met, the only tavern in the territory.

Atticus paused, watching me locate an elusive redbug on my leg. "Gentle breeding," he continued, when I had found and scratched it,....

Miss Maudie Atkinson baked a Lane cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight;....

He sent them packing next day armed with their charts and five quarts of shinny in their saddlebags—two apiece and one for the Governor.

Atticus strolled over to Miss Maudie’s sidewalk, where they engaged in an arm-waving conversation, the only phrase of which I caught was “…erected an absolute morphodite in that yard! Atticus, you’ll never raise ’em!”