To Kill a Mockingbird

by

Harper Lee

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Jean Louise Finch (Scout) Character Analysis

The novel’s protagonist. Over the course of the novel’s three years, Scout grows from six to nine years old. She’s bright, precocious, and a tomboy. Many neighbors and family members take offense to her love of overalls, though her father, Atticus, defends her right to wear what she wants and doesn’t force her to act like a lady. Scout adores and admires both Atticus and Jem, her older brother, who in her mind know everything there is to know. She finds Atticus in particular far more knowledgeable than her teachers at school, as her teachers take offense to the fact that Scout already knows how to read and write in cursive on the first day of first grade and force her to engage in mindless exercises. She prefers summertime, when she can run around the neighborhood with Jem and their friend Dill, who proposes to Scout at the beginning of their second summer together. Though Scout is just as terrified as Jem and Dill are of their neighbor Boo Radley, she’d rather be cautious about approaching Radley Place and ideally would give it a wide berth, but she often gets roped into Dill and Jem’s plans to somehow force Boo out of the house. When Atticus, a lawyer, agrees to take on the defense of a black man, Tom Robinson, in a rape case, Scout demonstrates her hotheadedness by defending Atticus’s honor against their majority-white community’s vitriol—though she tries her best to follow through with Atticus’s request that she take the moral high ground and not fight back. Scout struggles with her own prejudiced feelings, as when she can’t see the hypocrisy of hating dresses but thinking that boys shouldn’t learn to cook, or when she suggests that Tom Robinson is just a black person, and that it’s therefore normal and expected for people to treat him poorly. When Boo saves Scout and Jem from being attacked by Mr. Ewell (the father of the plaintiff in Robinson’s case) on Halloween night, Scout truly learns the power of putting herself in another’s shoes, as it allows her to see that Boo isn’t scary or evil—he’s merely different, and deserves respect just like anyone else.

Jean Louise Finch (Scout) Quotes in To Kill a Mockingbird

The To Kill a Mockingbird quotes below are all either spoken by Jean Louise Finch (Scout) or refer to Jean Louise Finch (Scout). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Good, Evil, and Human Dignity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it

[...]

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.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker)
Page Number: 5-6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“There's some folks who don't eat like us," she whispered fiercely, "but you ain't called on to contradict 'em at the table when they don't. That boy's yo' comp'ny and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear?”

“He ain't company, Cal, he's just a Cunningham—“

“Hush your mouth! Don't matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house's yo' comp'ny, and don't you let me catch you remarkin' on their ways like you was so high and mighty!”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Calpurnia (speaker), Walter Cunningham
Page Number: 27
Explanation and Analysis:

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—“

“Sir?”

“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Miss Caroline
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“There are just some kind of men who—who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

Related Characters: Miss Maudie Atkinson (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Mr. Radley, Nathan Radley
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

“If you shouldn't be defendin' him, then why are you doin' it?”

“For a number of reasons,” said Atticus. “The main one is, if I didn't I couldn't hold up my head in town, I couldn't represent this county in the legislature, I couldn't even tell you or Jem not to do something again.”

[…]

"Atticus, are we going to win it?"

“No, honey.”

“Then why—”

“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,” Atticus said.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Tom Robinson
Page Number: 86-87
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

After my bout with Cecil Jacobs when I committed myself to a policy of cowardice, word got around that Scout Finch wouldn't fight any more, her daddy wouldn't let her.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch, Cecil Jacobs
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:

“Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.

“Your father's right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Miss Maudie Atkinson (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Mockingbird
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch, Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose
Page Number: 115-16
Explanation and Analysis:

“Atticus, you must be wrong…”

“How's that?”

“Well, most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong…”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Tom Robinson
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

Lula stopped, but she said, “You ain't got no business bringin' white chillun here—they got their church, we got our'n. It is our church, ain't it, Miss Cal?”

[...]

When I looked down the pathway again, Lula was gone. In her place was a solid mass of colored people.

One of them stepped from the crowd. It was Zeebo, the garbage collector. “Mister Jem,” he said, “we're mighty glad to have you all here. Don't pay no 'tention to Lula, she's contentious because Reverend Sykes threatened to church her. She's a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas an' haughty ways—we're mighty glad to have you all.”

Related Characters: Zeebo (speaker), Lula (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem), Calpurnia, Reverend Sykes
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Aunt Alexandra
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

Dill's eyes flickered at Jem, and Jem looked at the floor. Then he rose and broke the remaining code of our childhood. He went out of the room and down the hall. “Atticus,” his voice was distant, “can you come here a minute, sir?”

Beneath its sweat-streaked dirt Dill's face went white. I felt sick.

[...]

Jem was standing in a corner of the room, looking like the traitor he was. “Dill, I had to tell him,” he said. “You can't run three hundred miles off without your mother knowin'.”

We left him without a word.

Related Characters: Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem) (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Atticus Finch, Charles Baker Harris (Dill)
Page Number: 159-60
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

“Well how do you know we ain't Negroes?”

“Uncle Jack Finch says we really don't know. He says as far as he can trace back the Finches we ain't, but for all he knows we mighta come straight out of Ethiopia durin' the Old Testament.”

“Well if we came out durin' the Old Testament it's too long ago to matter.”

“That's what I thought," said Jem, “but around here once you have a drop of Negro blood, that makes you all black.”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem) (speaker), Uncle Jack
Page Number: 184
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

“The way that man called him 'boy' all the time an' sneered at him, an' looked around at the jury every time he answered— … It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way. Hasn't anybody got any business talkin' like that—it just makes me sick.”

Related Characters: Charles Baker Harris (Dill) (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Tom Robinson, Mr. Gilmer
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

“They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.”

Related Characters: Atticus Finch (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem), Charles Baker Harris (Dill), Tom Robinson
Page Number: 243
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

“Oh child, those poor Mrunas,” she said, and was off. Few other questions would be necessary.

Mrs. Merriweather's large brown eyes always filled with tears when she considered the oppressed. “Living in that jungle with nobody but J. Grimes Everett,” she said. “Not a white person'll go near 'em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.”

Related Characters: Mrs. Grace Merriweather (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout)
Page Number: 263
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

[Jem] was certainly never cruel to animals, but I had never known his charity to embrace the insect world.

“Why couldn't I mash him?” I asked.

“Because they don't bother you,” Jem answered in the darkness. He had turned out his reading light.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem) (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Mockingbird
Page Number: 273
Explanation and Analysis:

Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch, Tom Robinson, Mr. Underwood
Related Symbols: The Mockingbird
Page Number: 275-76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 31 Quotes

A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishing-pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention.

It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose's [...] Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive.

Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog.

Summer, and he watched his children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him.

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem), Atticus Finch, Charles Baker Harris (Dill), Arthur Radley (Boo), Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose
Page Number: 320-21
Explanation and Analysis:

“When they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things…Atticus, he was real nice…” His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. “Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.” He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem), Arthur Radley (Boo)
Page Number: 322-23
Explanation and Analysis:
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Jean Louise Finch (Scout) Quotes in To Kill a Mockingbird

The To Kill a Mockingbird quotes below are all either spoken by Jean Louise Finch (Scout) or refer to Jean Louise Finch (Scout). For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Good, Evil, and Human Dignity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it

[...]

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.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker)
Page Number: 5-6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“There's some folks who don't eat like us," she whispered fiercely, "but you ain't called on to contradict 'em at the table when they don't. That boy's yo' comp'ny and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear?”

“He ain't company, Cal, he's just a Cunningham—“

“Hush your mouth! Don't matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house's yo' comp'ny, and don't you let me catch you remarkin' on their ways like you was so high and mighty!”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Calpurnia (speaker), Walter Cunningham
Page Number: 27
Explanation and Analysis:

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—“

“Sir?”

“—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Miss Caroline
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“There are just some kind of men who—who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

Related Characters: Miss Maudie Atkinson (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Mr. Radley, Nathan Radley
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

“If you shouldn't be defendin' him, then why are you doin' it?”

“For a number of reasons,” said Atticus. “The main one is, if I didn't I couldn't hold up my head in town, I couldn't represent this county in the legislature, I couldn't even tell you or Jem not to do something again.”

[…]

"Atticus, are we going to win it?"

“No, honey.”

“Then why—”

“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,” Atticus said.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Tom Robinson
Page Number: 86-87
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

After my bout with Cecil Jacobs when I committed myself to a policy of cowardice, word got around that Scout Finch wouldn't fight any more, her daddy wouldn't let her.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch, Cecil Jacobs
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:

“Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.

“Your father's right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Miss Maudie Atkinson (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Mockingbird
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch, Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose
Page Number: 115-16
Explanation and Analysis:

“Atticus, you must be wrong…”

“How's that?”

“Well, most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong…”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Tom Robinson
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

Lula stopped, but she said, “You ain't got no business bringin' white chillun here—they got their church, we got our'n. It is our church, ain't it, Miss Cal?”

[...]

When I looked down the pathway again, Lula was gone. In her place was a solid mass of colored people.

One of them stepped from the crowd. It was Zeebo, the garbage collector. “Mister Jem,” he said, “we're mighty glad to have you all here. Don't pay no 'tention to Lula, she's contentious because Reverend Sykes threatened to church her. She's a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas an' haughty ways—we're mighty glad to have you all.”

Related Characters: Zeebo (speaker), Lula (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem), Calpurnia, Reverend Sykes
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Aunt Alexandra
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

Dill's eyes flickered at Jem, and Jem looked at the floor. Then he rose and broke the remaining code of our childhood. He went out of the room and down the hall. “Atticus,” his voice was distant, “can you come here a minute, sir?”

Beneath its sweat-streaked dirt Dill's face went white. I felt sick.

[...]

Jem was standing in a corner of the room, looking like the traitor he was. “Dill, I had to tell him,” he said. “You can't run three hundred miles off without your mother knowin'.”

We left him without a word.

Related Characters: Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem) (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Atticus Finch, Charles Baker Harris (Dill)
Page Number: 159-60
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

“Well how do you know we ain't Negroes?”

“Uncle Jack Finch says we really don't know. He says as far as he can trace back the Finches we ain't, but for all he knows we mighta come straight out of Ethiopia durin' the Old Testament.”

“Well if we came out durin' the Old Testament it's too long ago to matter.”

“That's what I thought," said Jem, “but around here once you have a drop of Negro blood, that makes you all black.”

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem) (speaker), Uncle Jack
Page Number: 184
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

“The way that man called him 'boy' all the time an' sneered at him, an' looked around at the jury every time he answered— … It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way. Hasn't anybody got any business talkin' like that—it just makes me sick.”

Related Characters: Charles Baker Harris (Dill) (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Tom Robinson, Mr. Gilmer
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

“They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.”

Related Characters: Atticus Finch (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem), Charles Baker Harris (Dill), Tom Robinson
Page Number: 243
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

“Oh child, those poor Mrunas,” she said, and was off. Few other questions would be necessary.

Mrs. Merriweather's large brown eyes always filled with tears when she considered the oppressed. “Living in that jungle with nobody but J. Grimes Everett,” she said. “Not a white person'll go near 'em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.”

Related Characters: Mrs. Grace Merriweather (speaker), Jean Louise Finch (Scout)
Page Number: 263
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

[Jem] was certainly never cruel to animals, but I had never known his charity to embrace the insect world.

“Why couldn't I mash him?” I asked.

“Because they don't bother you,” Jem answered in the darkness. He had turned out his reading light.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem) (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Mockingbird
Page Number: 273
Explanation and Analysis:

Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch, Tom Robinson, Mr. Underwood
Related Symbols: The Mockingbird
Page Number: 275-76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 31 Quotes

A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishing-pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention.

It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose's [...] Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive.

Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog.

Summer, and he watched his children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him.

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem), Atticus Finch, Charles Baker Harris (Dill), Arthur Radley (Boo), Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose
Page Number: 320-21
Explanation and Analysis:

“When they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things…Atticus, he was real nice…” His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. “Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.” He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

Related Characters: Jean Louise Finch (Scout) (speaker), Atticus Finch (speaker), Jeremy Atticus Finch (Jem), Arthur Radley (Boo)
Page Number: 322-23
Explanation and Analysis: