Jean Louise Quotes & Sayings

Melbourne said I'll put it in my own words: the time your friends need you is when they're wrong, Jean Louise. They don't need you when they're right - " "What — Harper Lee

weather. As he turned to go, Jean Louise called to him. "Uncle Jack," she said. "What — Harper Lee

Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'. — Harper Lee

Jean Louise, did you come down on the train Like That? — Harper Lee

He always told his daughter the rest of it, quietly and solemnly, but Jean Louise sometimes thought she detected an unmistakably profane glint in Atticus Finch's eyes, or was it merely the light hitting his glasses? She never knew. — Harper Lee

Dr. Finch clenched his hands and tucked them under his chin. "Human birth is most unpleasant. It's messy, it's extremely painful, sometimes it's a risky thing. It is always bloody. So is it with civilization. The South's in its last agonizing birth pain. It's bringing forth something new and I'm not sure I like it, but I won't be here to see it. You will. Men like me and my brother are obsolete and we've got to go, but it's a pity we'll carry with us the meaningful things of this society - there were some good things in it." "Stop woolgathering and answer me!" Dr. Finch stood up, leaned on the table, and looked at her. The lines from his nose sprang to his mouth and made a harsh trapezoid. His eyes blazed, but his voice was still quiet: "Jean Louise, when a man's looking down the double barrel of a shotgun, he picks up the first weapon he can find to defend himself, be it a stone or a stick of stovewood or a citizens' council. — Harper Lee

Jean Louise, will you please listen to me?" "God damn you, what?" "I just want to ask you one thing, one thing - what the hell do you expect me to do? Tell me, what the hell do you expect me to do?" "Do? I expect you to keep your gold-plated ass out of citizens' councils! I don't give a damn if Atticus is sitting across from you, if the King of England's on your right and the Lord Jehovah's on your left - I expect you to be a man, that's all!" She — Harper Lee

Had Alexandra ever pressed Jean Louise's vulnerable points with awareness, she could have added another scalp to her belt, but after years of tactical study Jean Louise knew her enemy. Although she could rout her, Jean Louise had not yet learned how to repair the enemy's damage. — Harper Lee

When I pointed to him his palms slipped slightly, leaving greasy sweat streaks on the wall, and he hooked his thumbs in his belt. A strange spasm shook him, as if he heard fingernails scrape slate, but as I gazed at him in wonder the tension slowly drained from his face. His lips parted into a timid smile, and our neighbor's image blurred with my sudden tears.
"Hey, Boo," I said.
"Mr. Arthur, honey," said Atticus, gently correcting me. "Jean Louise, this is Mr. Arthur Radley. I believe he already knows you. — Harper Lee

Cal had told her all girls had it, it was natural as breathing,, it was a sign they were growing up, and they had it until they were in their fifties. At the time, Jean Louise was so overcome with despair at the prospect of being too old to enjoy anything when it would finally be over, she refrained from pursuing the subject. — Harper Lee

Jean Louise grinned. Her father said it took at least five years to learn law after one left law school: one practiced economy for two years, learned Alabama Pleading for two more, reread the Bible and Shakespeare for the fifth. Then one was fully equipped to hold on under any conditions. — Harper Lee

When someone shoots at us, we return fire," said Jean-Guy. Now Jacques did nod. "But it's equally important that when someone is kind to us, we return that as well, — Louise Penny

Henry laughed and said, "Honey, the sun rises and sets with that Bill of hers. Everything he says is Gospel. She loves her man." "Is that what loving your man is?" "Has a lot to do with it." Jean Louise said, "You mean losing your own identity, don't you?" "In a way, yes," said Henry. "Then I doubt if I shall ever marry. I never met a man - " "You're gonna marry me, remember?" "Hank, I may as well tell you now and get it over with: I'm not going to marry you. Period and that's that. — Harper Lee

The Chief had once told him about the behavior of gorillas when faced with an attack. They met it head on, staring down the enemy. But every now and then they'd reach out to touch the gorilla beside them. To make sure they were not alone. Keeping his eyes on the road, Jean-Guy reached out and touched Gamache's shoulder. — Louise Penny

he looked at me and Jean Louise with disgust. — Jenny Lawson

It's just that every time I've come home for the past five years - before that, even. From college - something's changed a little more . . ." " - and you're not sure you like it, eh?" Henry was grinning in the moonlight and she could see him. She sat up. "I don't know if I can tell you, honey. When you live in New York, you often have the feeling that New York's not the world. I mean this: every time I come home, I feel like I'm coming back to the world, and when I leave Maycomb it's like leaving the world. It's silly. I can't explain it, and what makes it sillier is that I'd go stark raving living in Maycomb." Henry said, "You wouldn't, you know. I don't mean to press you for an answer - don't move - but you've got to make up your mind to one thing, Jean Louise. You're gonna see change, you're gonna see Maycomb change its face completely in our lifetime. Your trouble, now, you want to have your cake and eat it: you want to stop the clock, but you can't. Sooner or later you'll — Harper Lee

Jean Louise's gleanings of adult morals and mores to date were few, but enough: it was possible to have a baby without being married, she knew that. Until today she neither knew nor cared how, because the subject was uninteresting, but if someone had a baby without being married, her family was plunged into deep disgrace. She had heard Alexandra go on at length about Disgraces to Families: disgrace involved being sent to Mobile and shut up in a Home away from decent people. One's family was never able to hold up their heads again. — Harper Lee

Jean Louise had a sinking feeling. The Hundred Years' War had progressed to approximately its twenty-sixth year with no indications of anything more than periods of uneasy truce. — Harper Lee

Atticus had owned an old canvas-top touring car, and once when he was taking Jem, Henry, and Jean Louise swimming, the car rolled over a particularly bad hump in the road and deposited Jem without. — Harper Lee

The knife hit deep, suddenly: "Jean Louise, your brother worried about your thoughtlessness until the day he died!" It was raining softly on his grave now, in the hot evening. You never said it, you never even thought it; if you'd thought it you'd have said it. You were like that. Rest well, Jem. She rubbed salt into it: I'm thoughtless, all right. Selfish, self-willed, I eat too much, and I feel like the Book of Common Prayer. Lord forgive me for not doing what I should have done and for doing what I shouldn't have done - oh hell. — Harper Lee

Maycomb did not have a paved street until 1935, courtesy of F. D. Roosevelt, and even then it was not exactly a street that was paved. For some reason the President decided that a clearing from the front door of the Maycomb Grammar School to the connecting two ruts adjoining the school property was in need of improvement, it was improved accordingly, resulting in skinned knees and cracked crania for the children and a proclamation from the principal that nobody was to play Pop-the-Whip on the pavement. Thus the seeds of states' rights were sown in the hearts of Jean Louise's generation. — Harper Lee

Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, — Harper Lee

We have to do a lot of things we don't want to do, Jean Louise." She blazed. "What kind of answer is that? — Harper Lee

Every man's island, Jean Louise, every man's watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious. — Harper Lee

Revival time was a time of war: war on sin, Coca-Cola, picture shows, hunting on Sunday; war on the increasing tendency of young women to paint themselves and smoke in public; war on drinking whiskey - in this connection at least fifty children per summer went to the altar and swore they would not drink, smoke, or curse until they were twenty-one; war on something so nebulous Jean Louise never could figure out what it was, except there was nothing to swear concerning it; and war among the town's ladies over who could set the best table for the evangelist. — Harper Lee

Jean Louise interrupted. Hester, let me ask you something. I've been home since Saturday now, and since Saturday I've heard a great deal of talk about mongrelizin' the race, and it's led me to wonder if that's not rather an unfortunate phrase, and if probably it should be discarded from Southern jargon these days. It takes two races to mongrelize a race - if that's the right word - and when we white people holler about mongrelizin', isn't that something of a reflection on ourselves as a race? The message I get from it is that if it were lawful, there'd be a wholesale rush to marry Negroes. If I were a scholar, which I ain't, I would say that kind of talk has a deep psychological significance that's not particularly flattering to the one who talks it. At its best, it denotes an alarmin' mistrust of one's own race. — Harper Lee

No, she didn't. Alexandra saw what Maycomb saw: Maycomb expected every daughter to do her duty. The duty of his only daughter to her widowed father after the death of his only son was clear: Jean Louise would return and make her home with Atticus; that was what a daughter did, and she who did not was no daughter. — Harper Lee

Atticus killed several birds with one stone when he read to his children, and would probably have caused a child psychologist considerable dismay: he read to Jem and Jean Louise whatever he happened to be reading, and the children grew up possessed of an obscure erudition. They cut their back teeth on military history, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, True Detective Mysteries, The Code of Alabama, the Bible, and Palgrave's Golden Treasury. — Harper Lee

Honey, the sun rises and sets with that Bill of hers. Everything he says is Gospel. She loves her man."
"Is that what loving your man is?"
"Has a lot to do with it."
Jean Louise said, "You mean losing your own identity, don't you?"
"In a way, yes," said Henry.
"Then I doubt if I shall ever marry. — Harper Lee

You're color blind, Jean Louise," he said. "You always have been, you always will be. The only differences you see between one human and another are differences in looks and intelligence and character and the like. You've never been prodded to look at people as a race, and now that race is the burning issue of the day, you're still unable to think racially. You see only people. — Harper Lee

While offering to the Lord the results of Mr. Cowper's hallucination, or declaring it was Love that lifted her, Jean Louise shared the warmness that prevails among diverse individuals who find themselves in the same boat for one hour each week. — Harper Lee

one. I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour on the hour. I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference. I need a watchman to go forth and proclaim to them all that twenty-six years is too long to play a joke on anybody, no matter how funny it is. 14 "Aunty," said Jean Louise, when they had cleared away the rubble of the morning's devastation, "if you don't want the car I'm going around to Uncle Jack's. — Harper Lee

In spite of herself, Jean Louise grinned. Alexandra could be relied upon to produce a malapropism on occasions, the most notable being her comment on the gulosity displayed by the youngest member of a Mobile Jewish family upon completing his thirteenth year: Alexandra declared that Aaron Stein was the greediest boy she had ever seen, that he ate fourteen ears of corn at his Menopause. — Harper Lee

In the dim past, Atticus had owned an old canvas-top touring car, and once when he was taking Jem, Henry, and Jean Louise swimming, the car rolled over a particularly bad hump in the road and deposited Jem without. Atticus drove serenely on until they reached Barker's Eddy, because Jean Louise had no intention of advising her father that Jem was no longer present, and she prevented Henry from doing so by catching his finger and bending it back. — Harper Lee

No, I mean I can smell somebody an' tell if they're gonna die. An old lady taught me how. Jean
Louise
Finch, you are going to die in three days. — Harper Lee

She had two minutes of peace before yesterday returned: nothing can kill the pleasure of one's first cigarette on a new morning. Jean Louise blew smoke carefully into the still air. She — Harper Lee

Every neight he read aloud to them until his voice cracked.
Atticus killed several birds with one stone when he read to his children, and would pobably have caused a child psychologist considerable dismay: he read to Jem and Jean Louise whatever he happened to be reading, and the children grew up possessed of an obsure eruidition. — Harper Lee

Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level." "Is — Harper Lee

Aunty! Jean Louise groaned. Coffees were peculiarly Maycombian in nature. They were given for girls who came home. Such girls were placed on view at 10:30 A.M. for the express purpose of allowing the women of their age who had remained enisled in Maycomb to examine them. Childhood friendships were rarely renewed under such conditions. — Harper Lee

There was no finer young man, said the people of Maycomb, than Henry Clinton. Jean Louise agreed. — Harper Lee

With her head on his shoulder, Jean Louise was content. It might work after all, she thought. But I am not domestic. I don't even know how to run a cook. What do ladies say to each other when they go visiting? I'd have to wear a hat. I'd drop the babies and kill 'em. — Harper Lee

Isn't it about time you got over that? Bury your dead, Jean Louise. — Harper Lee

She could not comprehend the attitudes of young people these days. Not that they needed understanding - young people were the same in every generation - but this cockiness, this refusal to take seriously the gravest questions of their lives, nettled and irritated her. Jean Louise was about to make the worst mistake of her life, and she glibly quoted those people at her, she mocked her. — Harper Lee

He went to the table and picked up a football magazine, opened it, thumbed through it, and was thumbing through it again when he said: "Scout, if there's ever anything that happens to you or something - you know - something you might not want to tell Atticus about - " "Huh?" "You know, if you get in trouble at school or anything - you just let me know. I'll take care of you." Jem sauntered from the livingroom, leaving Jean Louise wide-eyed and wondering if she were fully awake. — Harper Lee

Beauvoir was quiet, watching the Chief, taking in the gleam in his eye, the enthusiasm as he described what he'd found. Not the physical landscape, but the emotional. The intellectual.
Many might have thought the Chief Inspector was a hunter. He tracked down killers. But Jean Guy knew he wasn't that. Chief Inspector Gama he was an explorer by nature. He was never happier than when he was pushing the boundaries, exploring the internal terrain. Areas even the person themselves hadn't explored. Had never examined. Probably because it was too scary. — Louise Penny

Jean Louise," he said dryly, "not much more than five per cent of the South's population ever saw a slave, much less owned one. Now, something must have irritated the other ninety-five per cent." Jean Louise looked blankly at her uncle. "Has it never occurred to you - have you never, somewhere along the line, received vibrations to the effect - that this territory was a separate nation? No matter what its political bonds, a nation with its own people, existing within a nation? — Harper Lee

I could think of nothing else to say to her. In fact I could never think of anything to say to her, and I sat thinking of past painful conversations between us: How are you, Jean Louise? Fine, thank you ma'am, how are you? Very well, thank you; what have you been doing with yourself? Nothin'. Don't you do anything? Nome. Certainly you have friends? Yessum. Well what do you all do? Nothin'. — Harper Lee

The reason Armand Gamache could go there was because it wasn't totally foreign to him. He knew it because he'd seen his own burned terrain, he'd walked off the familiar and comfortable path inside his own head and heart and seen what festered in the dark. And one day Jean Guy Beauvoir would look at his own monsters, and then be able to recognize others. And maybe this was the day and this was the case. He hoped so. — Louise Penny

Jean Louise, when a man's looking down the double barrel of a shotgun, he picks up the first weapon he can find to defend himself, be it a stone or a stick of stovewood or a citizens' council." "That — Harper Lee

That was why she was happy. He now knew that happiness ad kindness went together. There was not one without the other. For Jean-Guy it was a struggle. For Annie it seemed natural. — Louise Penny

If just for one week in the South would show them some simple, impartial courtesy. I wonder what would happen. Do you think it'd give 'em airs or the beginnings of self-respect? Have you ever been snubbed, Atticus? Do you know how it feels? No, don't tell me they're children and don't feel it: I was a child and felt it, so grown children must feel, too. A real good snub, Atticus, makes you feel like you're too nasty to associate with people. How they're as good as they are now is a mystery to me, after a hundred years of systematic denial that they are human. I wonder what kind of miracle we could work with a week's decency. — Harper Lee

[T]he time your friends need you is when they're wrong, Jean Louise. They don't need you when they're right — Harper Lee

Bang. You're dead.'
Gamache swung around, but had recognised the voice an instant after he'd begun to turn.
'You're a sneak, Jean Guy. I'm going to have to put a cow bell on you.'
'Not again.' It wasn't often he could get the drop on the chief. But Beauvoir had begun to worry. Suppose he snuck up on Gamache sometime and he had a heart attack? It would certainly take the fun out of it. — Louise Penny

We wondered, sometimes, when your conscience and his would part company, and over what." Dr. Finch smiled. "Well, we know now. I'm just thankful I was around when the ructions started. Atticus couldn't talk to you the way I'm talking - " "Why not, sir?" "You wouldn't have listened to him. You couldn't have listened. Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level. — Harper Lee

Everything's still there. It happened, it was. But you know, it's bearable somehow. It's--it's bearable."..."Do you know why it's bearable now,...?"..."It's bearable, Jean Louise, because you are your own person now."..."...You were an emotional cripple, getting answers from him, leaning on him, assuming your answers would always be his answers."..."When you happened along and saw him doing something that seemed to you to be the very antithesis of his conscience--your conscience--you literally could not stand it. It made you physically ill. Life became hell on earth for you. You had to kill yourself, or he had to kill you to get you functioning as a separate entity. — Harper Lee

Jean Louise was accustomed to her uncle's brand of intellectual shorthand: it was his custom to state one or two isolated facts, and a conclusion seemingly unsupported thereby. Slowly and surely, if prodded correctly, Dr. Finch would unwind the reel of his strange lore to reveal reasoning that glittered with a private light of its own. — Harper Lee

She didn't look like Louise. She didn't look much like anybody except herself. — Jean Thompson

New York has all the answers. People go to the YMHA, the English-Speaking Union, Carnegie Hall, the New School for Social Research, and find all the answers. The city lives by slogans, isms, and fast sure answers. New York is saying to me right now: you, Jean Louise Finch, are not reacting according to our doctrines regarding your kind, therefore you do not exist. — Harper Lee

If Hank and I - Hank. She glanced down the long, low-ceilinged livingroom at the double row of women, women she had merely known all her life, and she could not talk to them five minutes without drying up stone dead. I can't think of anything to say to them. They talk incessantly about the things they do, and I don't know how to do the things they do. If we married - if I married anybody from this town - these would be my friends, and I couldn't think of a thing to say to them. I would be Jean Louise the Silent. I couldn't possibly bring off one of these affairs by myself, and there's Aunty having the time of her life. I'd be churched to death, bridge-partied to death, called upon to give book reviews at the Amanuensis Club, expected to become a part of the community. It takes a lot of what I don't have to be a member of this wedding. — Harper Lee

Where other women ... were lovely, Annie Gamache was alive.
Late, too late, Jean Guy Beauvoir had come to appreciate how very important it was, how very attractive it was, how very rare it was, to be fully alive. — Louise Penny

It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing, keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess. — Harper Lee

Had she been able to think, Jean Louise might have prevented events to come by considering the day's occurrences in terms of a recurring story as old as time: the chapter which concerned her began two hundred years ago and was played out in a proud society the bloodiest war and harshest peace in modern history could not destroy, returning, to be played out again on private ground in the twilight of civilization no wars and no peace could save. — Harper Lee

Alexandra was one of those people who had gone through life at no cost to themselves; had she been obliged to pay any emotional bills during her earthly life, Jean Louise could imagine her stopping at the check-in desk in heaven and demanding a refund. — Harper Lee

I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipt, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written or eloquent, they are love letters, everyday letters, secret letters and mundane letters talking about fruit and babies and tennis matches, from people signing themselves as Majorie or Jean....I can't bring myself to dispose of these snippets and snapshots of lives that once meant (or still do mean) so much. — Louise Walters

[S]ome men who cheat their wives out of grocery money wouldn't think of cheating the grocer. Men tend to carry their honesty in pigeonholes, Jean Louise. They can be perfectly honest in some ways and fool themselves in other ways. — Harper Lee

Jean Louise had lost touch with nearly everyone she grew up with and did not wish particularly to rediscover the companions of her adolescence. Her schooldays were her most miserable days, she was unsentimental to the point of callousness about the women's college she had attended, nothing displeased her more than to be set in the middle of a group of people who played Remember Old So-and-So. — Harper Lee