“Admittedly, I am only seventeen now. But some years are longer than others.”
“And now I am here, as alone as I've ever been. I am seventeen years old. This is not how it's suppose to be. This is not how my life is suppose to turn out.”
“Now here I am, seventeen with a bullet.”
“Who am I?” he whispered. “For years I pretended I was other than I was, and then I gloried that I might return to the truth of myself, only to find there is no truth to return to. I was an ordinary child, and then I was a not very good man, and now I do not know how to be either of those things any longer. I do not know what I am, and when Jem is gone, there will be no one to show me.”
“Some people are boys longer than others.”
“A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen, or at most twenty years—seldom longer.”