“Myself I love a thunderstorm better than anything. Sometimes I will run to the top of the hill to whirl around and around on my Indian Rock in the wind, it is like a dance I can not stop. The smell of the lightning goes into your nose and down your whole body. Old Bess says if you get hit by lightning yet live you will have special powers, well I could use some of those. So I don't care if I get hit or not.”

“When I think of you, some times my heart leaps right out my chest, and goes running around the room dancing!!”

“What I didn't understand, all those years when I was waiting for my life to start, was that it had already started. I was already living it! Those were the most important years, and I didn't even know it.”

“I don't want to hear any words like that while I'm here. Scout, you'll get in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You want to grow up to be a lady, don't you?'I said not particularly.”

“When you're soulmates, it hits you like lightning, and you know that's the one person in the world you were meant to be with. You don't think you're soulmates; you just know it's your destiny whether you like it or not.”

“I think it was this: like most of us, he was carrying a misery in his soul. I don't say it to forgive what he done, [sic] only to say it as true as I can. He was a wrong-minded man, but inside- I swear this is true- he was always that little boy eating that fried-egg sandwich in that dark hallway while the steam pipe dripped water on his head. I don't ask you to excuse him, only to understand that there's people who don't have what others do, and sometimes they get hurtful in their hearts, and they puff themselves up and try all sorts of schemes to level the ground- to get the bricks and joints all plumb, Ray used to say. They take wrong turns, hit dead ends, and sometimes they never make their way back. ~Clare”

“I love you," she said. "You made me fall in love with you. I don't care how tall you are or what color your hair is-I care about you. You make me laugh. You're smart. You're gentle. And you're real, you're a real person, not some jock with a facade that's going to fall apart when I get to know him. I know you already, and I love you, you idiot. I don't care what you do with toilet paper.”