“Oh, no! I haven’t lost hope at all! Look, we’re all here–we’re all having a good time on Sunday night! I just read you a lot of depressing shit like that and talk about these things because you have to think about them sometimes. I haven’t lost hope at all. There’s going to be abortion; there’s going to be health care; there’s going to be medical marijuana; there’s going to be peace in the world; there’s going to be homosexual marriage: all this is going to happen, because all the generation that hates it and is against it and is fervent about it is going to die. I may not get to see it, but . . . The people who are young right now don’t care about any of those things: they care about technology; they care about eating; they care about learning. They’re curious; they want to find out things; they want the world to be bigger; they want to know about other people in other places; they want to inform themselves and use analytical thinking; they don’t trust the traditional media sources that we’ve all been poisoned to fucking listen to like the television and the newspapers and all the shit that comes up on the Internet: they learn to fucking discern because they have to pick out pieces of information all the time. So, I have nothing but fucking hope for the world.”

“I look around briefly at the other players like I always do before a game. Other than Queenie, Bill, and Talon, I don’t know any of them (and I don’t care enough about them to know them). But if there’s going to be any cordiality, any forced politeness or ‘Aw, shucks, let’s all just try to have a good time here tonight’ kind of blather, then now’s the time to get it out of the way before I get down to the business of screwing everyone out of their hopes and dreams.”

“ "You’re the first girl I’ve met around here who’s real, and who cares about things and likes to do things. But half the time, you decide the conversation’s over in mid-sentence and take off. Or you ignore me when we’re at school and other people are around, and you tell your cousin that there’s nothing going on between us and that you’re not interested me at all.""Me? What about you?""What about me?""You’re the master of saying one word and disappearing. And you have all these things that you care about, like Bea and Oliver and surfing and acting, but most people would never know that. Your father thinks you can’t wait to be a banker and all your friends think you don’t care about anything. And meanwhile you’ve gone from a person who acted like he cared about me to a professional bodyguard doing a favor for my aunt. I mean, what is the whole Secret Service act about?”His jaw was clenched. “I don’t want anything to you.”“Nothing’s happened to me.”“Oh, like when you got hit by a car?”“It didn’t hit me.”“But I should have been there. I got caught up, talking to Mr. Dudley, and I was late, and I let you stand out there all alone.”“Quinn, that makes no sense.”“I just don’t want it to happen again.”“What don’t you want to happen?”“I don’t want anyone I care about to get hurt on my watch.”That shut us both up. We were silent for a while, each looking out our respective windows as we sped along the highway. And then I figured it out. “This is about your mom, isn’t it?”He just sort of shrugged. And then he said, “Probably.”I moved closer and leaned into him. After a moment he put his arm around my shoulder. And we just stayed like that, not talking, the rest of the way to the airport.”

“The one sure thing about Marbury is that it’s a horrible place. But so is right here, too. And there’s certain benefit in the obviousness of its brutality, because in Marbury there’s no doubt about the nature of things: good and evil, or guilt and innocence, for example. Not like here, where you could be sitting in the park next to a doctor or someone and not have any idea what a sick and dangerous sonofabitch he really is. Because we always expect things to be proper, even if we haven’t learned our fucking lesson that it just doesn’t work out like that all the time.”

“Jem: I’ve thought about it a lot lately and I’ve got it figured out. There’s four kinds of folks in Maycomb County. There’s the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there’s the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes. The thing about it is, our kind of folks don’t like the Cunninghams, the Cunninghams don’t like the Ewells, and the Ewells hate and despise the colored folks.Scout: Naw, Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.Jem: That’s what I thought, too. When I was your age. If there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I’m beginning to understand something. I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all this time… it’s because he wants to stay inside.”

“I’m curious about things that people aren’t supposed to see—so, for example, I liked going to the British Museum, but I would like it better if I could go into all the offices and storage rooms, I want to look in all the drawers and—discover stuff. And I want to know about people. I mean, I know it’s probably kind of rude but I want to know why you have all these boxes and what’s in them and why all your windows are papered over and how long it’s been that way and how do you feel when you wash things and why don’t you do something about it?”