“I never loved reading until I feared I would lose it. One does not love breathing.”

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

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

“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 came to the conclusion that people were just peculiar, I withdrew from them, and never thought about them until I was forced to.”

“Jem scooped up an armful of dirt, patted it into a mound on which he added another load, and another until he had constructed a torso. "Jem, I ain't never heard of a nigger snowman," I said.”

“I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.”