Finch House Quotes

Finch kept his house militarily spotless, but books tended to pile up wherever he sat down, and because it was his habit to sit down anywhere he got ready, there were small stacks of books in odd places about the house that were a constant curse to his cleaning woman. He would not let her touch them, and he insisted on apple-pie neatness, so the poor creature was obliged to vacuum, dust, and polish around them. One unfortunate maid lost her head and lost his place in Tuckwell’s Pre-Tractarian Oxford, and Dr. Finch shook a broom at her.

MOTHER – By Ted Kooser Mid April already, and the wild plums bloom at the roadside, a lacy white against the exuberant, jubilant green of new grass and the dusty, fading black of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet, only the delicate, star-petaled blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume. You have been gone a month today and have missed three rains and one nightlong watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar from six to eight while fat spring clouds went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured, a storm that walked on legs of lightning, dragging its shaggy belly over the fields. The meadowlarks are back, and the finches are turning from green to gold. Those same two geese have come to the pond again this year, honking in over the trees and splashing down. They never nest, but stay a week or two then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts, burning in circles like birthday candles, for this is the month of my birth, as you know, the best month to be born in, thanks to you, everything ready to burst with living. There will be no more new flannel nightshirts sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand. You asked me if I would be sad when it happened and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner, as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that. Were it not for the way you taught me to look at the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.

Let’s be Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem, carefully watch their father’s behavior as the house next door to theirs burns to the ground. As the fire creeps closer and closer to the Finches’ home, Atticus appears so calm that Scout and Jem finally decide that “it ain’t time to worry yet.” We need to be Atticus. Hands in our pockets. Calm. Believing. So that our children will look at us and even with a fire raging in front of them, they’ll say, “Huh. Guess it’s not time to worry yet.

Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets.

All right. I do not think she will attack, though. She is a nice inhuman." "You mean nonhuman. Inhuman is an adjective," I said, as I rose from the lawn and padded softly around the left side of the house to the backyard. "Hey, I’m not a native speaker. Give me a break.

You mean nonhuman. Inhuman is an adjective, I said, as I rose from the lawn and padded softly around the left side of the house to the backyard.

No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks." .... "That's what I thought too," he said at last, "when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time . . . it's because he wants to stay inside.

You may scold your carpenter, when he has made a bad table, though you can't make a table yourself.' I say to you - 'Mr. Finch, you may point out a defect in a baby's petticoats, though you haven't got a baby yourself!' Doesn't that satisfy you? All right! Take another illustration. Look at your room here. I can see in the twinkling of an eye, that it's badly lit. You have only got one window - you ought to have two. Is it necessary to be a practical builder to discover that? Absurd! Are you satisfied now? No! Take another illustration. What's this printed paper, here, on the chimney-piece? Assessed Taxes. Ha! Assessed Taxes will do. You're not in the House of Commons; you're not a Chancellor of the Exchequer - but haven't you an opinion of your own about taxation, in spite of that? Must you and I be in Parliament before we can presume to see that the feeble old British Constitution is at its last gasp?

Miss Finch, it’s not wise for officers to quarter in the same house with an unmarried gentlewoman. Have a care for your reputation, if your father does not.” “Have a care for my reputation?” She had to laugh. Then she lowered her voice. “This, from the man who flattened me in the road and kissed me without leave?” “Precisely.” His eyes darkened. His meaning washed over her in a wave of hot, sensual awareness. Surely he wasn’t implying… No. He wasn’t implying at all. Those hard jade eyes were giving her a straightforward message, and he underscored it with a slight flex of his massive arms: I am every bit as dangerous as you suppose. If not more so. “Take your kind invitation and run home with it. When soldiers and maids live under the same roof, things happen. And if you happened to find yourself under me again…” His hungry gaze raked her body. “You wouldn’t escape so easily.” She gasped. “You are a beast.” “Just a man, Miss Finch. Just a man.

Excuse my dress. I was half an hour late this morning. When you lose half an hour in this house, you never can pick it up again, try how you may. -Reverend Finch's wife

But Mrs Dubose held us: 'Not only a Finch waiting on tables but one in the court-house lawing for niggers!

Tranquility is the soul of our community.” Not a quarter mile’s distance away, Susanna Finch sat in the lace-curtained parlor of the Queen’s Ruby, a rooming house for gently bred young ladies. With her were the room house’s newest prospective residents, a Mrs. Highwood and her three unmarried daughters. “Here in Spindle Cove, young ladies enjoy a wholesome, improving atmosphere.” Susanna indicated a knot of ladies clustered by the hearth, industriously engaged in needlework. “See? The picture of good health and genteel refinement.” In unison, the young ladies looked up from their work and smiled placid, demure smiles. Excellent. She gave them an approving nod. Ordinarily, the ladies of Spindle Cove would never waste such a beautiful afternoon stitching indoors. They would be rambling the countryside, or sea bathing in the cove, or climbing the bluffs. But on days like these, when new visitors came to the village, everyone understood some pretense at propriety was necessary. Susanna was not above a little harmless deceit when it came to saving a young woman’s life. “Will you take more tea?” she asked, accepting a fresh pot from Mrs. Nichols, the inn’s aging proprietress. If Mrs. Highwood examined the young ladies too closely, she might notice that mild Gaelic obscenities occupied the center of Kate Taylor’s sampler. Or that Violet Winterbottom’s needle didn’t even have thread.

The list wasn't just a distraction for her anymore. She'd learned how to fight for something you believe in from Attics Finch; she'd learned how to survive with a tiger like Pi; she'd learned never to stay in a creepy house in Cornwall, maybe just go to a B&B or something instead' and from Amir in The Kite Runner she'd discovered it was never too late to do the right thing.

Even in the coldest weather, the harbor, the fields, the woods, all are alive. Blue jays fly, and brown winter wrens; finches feed on birch seed. Tiny, unseen things crawl, hunt, live, die. Lacewings hibernate under the loose bark on the trees. Caddis-fly larvae carry houses made from plant debris on their backs, and aphids huddle on the alders. Wood frogs sleep frozen beneath piles of leaf mold, and beetles and back swimmers, newts and spotted salamanders, their tails thick with stored fat, all flicker in the icy waters above. There are carpenter ants, and snow fleas, and spiders, and black mourning cloak butterflies that flit across the snow like burned paper. White-footed mice and woodland voles and pygmy shrews scurry through the slash, ever-wary of the foxes and weasels and the vicious, porcupine-hunting fishers that share the habitat. The snowshoe hare changes its coat to white in response to the diminishing daylight hours, the better to hide itself from its predators. Because the predators never go away.

You reckon he’s crazy?” Miss Maudie shook her head. “If he’s not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets—” “Atticus don’t ever do anything to Jem and me in the house that he don’t do in the yard,” I said, feeling it my duty to defend my parent. “Gracious child, I was raveling a thread, wasn’t even thinking about your father, but now that I am I’ll say this: Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets. How’d you like some fresh poundcake to take home?” I liked it very much. Next

Walking around in the garden of Nature, most men have the conceit to think that they know everything. Yet almost all are blind to one of the outstanding principles that Nature employs in her work: the inner separation of the species of all living beings on Earth. Even a superficial glance shows that nature follows a rigid basic law in which all life-forms are restricted to definite limits when propagating and multiplying their own kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field mouse with the field mouse, the house mouse with the house mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc.

From all enchanted things of earth and air, this preciousness has been drawn. From the south wind that breathed a century and a half over the green wheat; from the perfume of the growing grasses waving over heavy-laden clover and laughing veronica, hiding the green finches, baffling the bee; from rose-lined hedge, woodbine, and cornflower, azure blue, where yellowing wheat stalks crowd up under the shadow of green firs. All the devious brooklets’ sweetness where the iris stays the sunlight; all the wild woods hold of beauty; all the broad hills of thyme and freedom thrice a hundred years repeated. “A hundred years of cowslips, bluebells, violets; purple spring and golden autumn; sunshine, shower, and dewy mornings; the night immortal; all the rhythm of time unrolling. A chronicle unwritten and past all power of writing; who shall preserve a record of the petals that fell from the roses a century ago? The swallows to the house-tops three hundred — times think of that! Thence she sprang, and the world yearns toward her beauty as to flowers that are past. The loveliness of seventeen is centuries old. That is why passion is almost sad.

not from the Esperanza guest house itself.

I mean, seriously, dude,” he said, “I allow flexible hours, but this eleven thirty shit has to stop. It makes me look bad to my boss when he sees you rolling in so late.” “I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain that I had willfully and radically rearranged my priorities and, as a consequence, no longer gave a damn about work. Sure, I was willing to maintain my Business-Man persona, but only in ways that suited me as a family man. “I’ll try to work it out so I get in sooner.” “Don’t try, idiot. Do. Ten o’clock. That’s the latest I want you coming in.” “Ten o’clock . . .” I shook my head and let out a long, contemplative sigh. I did the math, working backward from ten o’clock: Leave the house by nine. Kids over to Mary’s at eight thirty, which gives me only thirty minutes to eat, shower, and get dressed. That won’t work. The alternative is waking up earlier, like around six. No fucking way. “I don’t know if that’s going to work.” He laughed. “Ten o’clock. Make it happen.” I knew I couldn’t give him a plausible explanation for my eleven thirty start time. No one in the chain of command above me at work would care about my Best Practices. So, in the end, I lied. “Ten o’clock it is.

Belief isn’t required. Finch told me my father scoffed at it all, and he’s just as dead as the other dukes.” “So

saw the good in everyone and saw more nobility in the action of a miner working long hours to feed his family, than he saw in a lazy politician who fell asleep in the House of Commons, purporting to do good for the country.

In the middle of the house stood the largest, scariest man she’d ever seen. Senhor Finch had been sunshine, but this foreigner was a night storm. He seemed to fill the house like a dark cloud. Too big, too strong, his gaze too sharp on her. And as she turned to flee, he thundered, “Stop!” And the next second, the man had her arm in his grip.

The truth was that I didn't know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until someone uses it and then returns it to that corner, now knowing that it was there by casual chance, until slowly that corner becomes its hallowed place, where you can always find the broom - just as all traditions begin as accidents, how the borders of countries are formed, how we marry, how we make friends and children - so, until Oxford, had I lived, within a sequence of non decisions, and yet with the same misdirected conviction of intentionality with which humans infuse their errors and felicities alike.

Two months later, Gail brought Bill home to meet her parents, and Beryl, a nervous mama having heard so much about the gallant Navy boy, served up her best pot roast with onions, a heap of buttery mashed potatoes with Gail’s favorite gravy, and boiled carrots for Sunday dinner. Before dinner was served, they sat on the porch and made homemade ice cream together. Gail sat on the ice cream bucket while Bill churned—abiding the flirting of Baby Lou and worldly Laila, though married with a baby. The Navy boy couldn’t care less about the two sisters because he was busy pouring ice cubes and salt into the bucket, soon hidden again under Gail’s skirt. Coalbert, the working boy, accompanied by his cute girlfriend, Ivy, wasn’t going to be outdone by a crew cut. He started making pig squeals and then said, “Come on, piggy, I wanna kiss you!” This was the story that humiliated Gail the most. She hated when Coalbert told stories from their Arkansas childhood. “What’s with him?” Bill looked at Gail. Coalbert took over and explained how Gail had fallen in love with the baby pigs they had bought to ward off starvation in Western Grove. “She’d run chasing them through the mud and shit, ‘Come on, piggy, I wanna kiss you!’” Gail got off the ice cream bucket and walked into the house. Bill laughed and stayed on the porch with Coalbert and the sisters, shooting the breeze and catching up with stories to embarrass Gail.

Gail bent over the face. Suddenly, she lurched backward. Her hand went to her forehead. “Oh! This is Lloyd Crocker, the love of my life! We were engaged at the end of high school. He was the nicest, sweetest boy, but I messed up.” “You? How did you mess it up?” “Oh, he took me to a party at his friend’s house and I started flirting with his friend for some reason, maybe to make him jealous; I don’t remember. So, Lloyd took me home and asked for his ring back. He said he couldn’t trust me. Oh, I was brokenhearted over him. After I married Rich, Lloyd looked me up and we went for a walk. By then, he had a child and so did I. Oh, how I’ve regretted losing him. I hope he had a good life.” Elsie recognized her mother’s feckless heart had never truly been rehabilitated. She could forget anyone if the next person in line seemed entertaining.

Bereaved, she made it home, thanked the neighbor and headed to bed to sob herself to sleep. Rich’s arrival from work was followed by a rattlesnake response to the two children wandering the house without supervision. Finding Gail in bed, he berated his wife for her selfishness. Gail announced the miscarriage to Rich. “I hope you’re happy.” He shrugged and said, “I’m sorry about that. Comm ci comme sa. You win some, you lose a bunch. I guess I’ll go fix spaghetti for the girls.” She turned over to look him in the eye. “It was a beautiful, perfectly formed little boy,” she said with a tear-streaked face. Rich looked a little stunned at the news. He heard his wife’s voice dull compared to the coursing blood in his ears. “Yes, he looked like you. His curls, his lashes…” Maybe he would have wanted a son, but the wheels of his mind kept turning. “There’s always another night, another baby to be had when he’s out of college, another son to be born when we’re more financially stable.” “If you wouldn’t have tricked me…” “Into this pregnancy,” she finished his thought. “And so, you think you have tricked me back.

Life had sprung up along the trail. The thin film of green in the trees had become a cloud of new leaves. Robins, bluebirds, vireos, finches, songbirds of all types made the brush along the trail a wall of sharp melody.

I never had him in my house,” sniffed many great ladies, though it must be owned that the great majority of them had. Meanwhile the men in their clubs chomped fretfully on cigars and said things like, “Damn country is going to hell, been saying it for years. I expect the French to invade by the hour, I tell you,” which was very consoling and pleasant to contemplate.

Their houses often hosted the defining parties of a season or the most select evening salons. Yet it was typical of Lady Jane that she was going to marry a man who would much rather be searching for clues in the alleyway of a slum than having supper in one of the palaces of

was a strange political system that led to Hilary representing Liverpool, while the Liberal Party’s current leader in the House, William Gladstone, had grown up in Liverpool but for a long time represented Oxford, of all places. Still, he also believed that his

In 1775 she wrote to the governess of the children, Lady Charlotte Finch, and told her, ‘if every body is well behaved, at the Queens House of the Female party I should be glad to see my Daughters on Wednesday morning between 10 and 11.’20 Before your eyebrows hit your hairline, remember that this was the Queen of Great Britain. Even her children needed an appointment.

This time I wore a bonnet, otherwise the house keeper would scold me as if I were a thoughtless child; the sun will cook your brain and addle your pretty little mind, Mrs. Finch. Right, I don't think a bonnet could help you any, Madame.

Barkapalooza open house?” Dr. V. stood in the center of the group, as silent as any of the girls had seen him. “I am really going to miss you,” he said. “So before our guests arrive, I want to let you know that this is the last time you’ll ever see me in a polo shirt.” Everyone laughed. “Would you honor me with a group picture?” While Daisy corralled Atticus and Finch, the girls lined up to pose with a pet of their choice. Gaby held Feather. Alma took the new kitten Milagro. Secret nestled in Mrs. Kohler’s arms. Dr. Villalobos sat in the center with Snowflake

She could not attend her university, which was closed; she could not earn money, because public work for women, save a few specialized jobs, was forbidden; she couldn’t even go on a walk through the neighborhood and watch the finches dart from tree to tree.

What happened then, we know. They planned to murder Soames, under the favorable condition of a ball, which adds confusion to any incident, and with the false lead of the valuable object in Barnard’s house, which would divert any detective

Barnard protested at first, arguing that his own presence in the house, as an officer of the mint, surely constituted protection. The very fact that we had chosen his house, after the attacks on the mint, seemed proof to him.

She nodded. He’d lived in that study. The house had been empty for years.

I was a prisoner. In this house. He didn’t let me out. I had no friends. I wasn’t even allowed to see your grandmother more than twice a year. Come to think of it, I should call her. Visit her. I can now.

After her dad had died, Zoe’s life had changed. It had been like she was the mother, and Annette the child. And a very difficult one at that. It was only when Nicholas was born that she’d left. There was no way she was raising him in a house with a drunk.

I provoked him by being a gay man. I provoked him by bringing another man back to my house. I provoked him by refusing to stop being who I am. So yes, I guess you could say I provoked

He’ll come back to where he left his victims. It’s an important place to him. He’ll want to relive what happened here. He’ll go back to Adam’s house, too. Have you got someone watching it?

Bodega Bay was the same harbor where Alfred Hitchcock had filmed his 1963 horror classic, The Birds, the movie that made the world think twice about backyard feeders. Hitchcock knew the worst shocks came from the mundane, and few creatures were as widespread, and as taken for granted, as birds. So the great director had western gulls dive-bombing children at an outdoor birthday party, raspberry-dipped house finches pouring into a living room through the fireplace, and American crows slashing at Tippi Hed-ren while she cowered in a bedroom. Suffice to say, The Birds was not a popular movie with birders on board this tour boat. After lifetimes of weekends in the field, they knew birds didn’t attack humans. The only way Hitchcock had got ravens to chase actors was to sprinkle their hair with seed. Crows lurked on the gutters of the old schoolhouse because he affixed magnets to their feet. Children fleeing swarms of blackbirds in the movie were actually running on a studio treadmill with birds tied to their necks. It all seemed silly to Levantin. The only menacing thing birds ever did to him was poop on his patio.

I think people were dealing drugs from that house and they want as little police attention on them as possible.

Beyond all that, it was a tremendous thing to have him in the house. It meant that Lenox was a serious participant in the grand game of London politics, someone on the move. Disraeli wasn’t any longer a very sociable fellow; his visit here would be on people’s lips the next morning.

Worse still, you were married to his mother. He was legitimate. Not a bastard. My question is this: How could you have let your own son work as a footman for three years, and in your house? What sort of man would tolerate such a circumstance?

Yes, you can make all the unpleasant faces you want, but while I was living there you were in your father’s house, looked after by nannies, eating off of silver, learning about what your old ancestors did at, at Agincourt … no, we’re very different, you and I.

Such professors as are at this moment, in almost every newspaper in the country,—scientific journals among the number,—abusing and ridiculing the poor farmer for destroying the birds that destroy his grain; and telling him, if he were to let the birds alone, they would eat the insects that commit far greater devastation on his precious cerealia! Conceited theorists! it has never occurred to them, that the victims of the farmer’s fowling-piece—the birds that eat corn—would not touch an insect if they were starving! The farmer does not make war on the insect-eating birds. Rarely, or never, does he expend powder and shot on the swallow, the wagtail, the tomtit, the starling, the thrush, the blackbird, the wren, the robin, or any of the grub and fly-feeders. His “game” are the buntings and Fringillidae,—the larks, linnets, finches, barley-birds, yellowhammers, and house sparrows, that form the great flocks afflicting him both in seed-time and harvest;