"To Kill a Mockingbird" by
Harper Lee
It is difficult to know where to start when talking about this
novel. It is of such quality that it bears reading time after
time. If you have not seen the film version, be sure to do so
as it is a classic. The casting is perfect, the photography brilliant,
the acting is so good that the viewer loses sight of them being
actors and the music captures the mood of the novel. Obviously
, there will be omissions in the film, but we have the book for
the full story.
No matter how many times I see the film or read the book, the
quotation from Page 224 always raises goosebumps!
Page 11
- Maycomb was an
old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In
rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the
sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square.
- Somehow, it was
hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules
hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering
shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff
collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before
noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like
soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
- People moved
slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and
out of the stores around it, took their time about everything.
A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There
was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and
no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries
of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism
for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told
that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.
Page 224:
- Someone was punching
me, but I was reluctant to take my eyes from the people below
us, and from the image of Atticus's lonely walk down the aisle.
- "Mis Jean
Louise?"
- I looked around.
They were standing. All around us and in the balcony
on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their
feet. Reverend Sykes's voice was as distant as Judge Taylor's:
- "Miss Jean
Louise, stand up, Your father's passin'."
Page 292:
Neighbors bring food with death
and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo
was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and
chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.
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