“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”

“The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me - he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”

“I told him I'd always found the description a little too long on adjectives and a little too short on specifics.”

“Jem also told me that if I breathed a word to Atticus, if in any way I let Atticus know I knew, Jem would personally never speak to me again.”

“I reckon if he'd wanted us to know it, he'da told us. If he was proud of it, he'da told us." "Maybe it just slipped his mind," I said. "Naw Scout, it's something you wouldn't understand. Atticus is real old, but I wouldn't care if he couldn't do a blessed thing." ... "Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!”

“In fact the bare adjective "bad" hardly scratches the surface of the man's awesome incapacity.”