Quotes About Tradition

It is not meet that the strong, free limbs of manhood should be fettered by the silken threads of ceremony.

The only two places you stand on receiving lines are funerals and weddings. There was probably something poignant in that fact, but Maya couldn't imagine what it could be. She

International Order of Odd Fellows

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

Without the Canon, we cease to think.

cannot, with Nietzsche and with Pater, believe that life can only be appreciated as an aesthetic phenomenon. But I wish to believe that, and perhaps Judaic tradition blocks me from it. Wisdom needs to be added to aesthetic splendor and cognitive power as the three stigmata or criteria of knowledge or value. But where except in Shakespeare are all three to be discovered consistently?

I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.

I never understood her preoccupation with heredity. 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.

Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her.

I thought she was going to spit in it, which was the only reason anybody in Maycomb held out his hand: it was a time-honored method of sealing oral contracts. Wondering what bargain we had made, I turned to the class for an answer, but the class looked back at me in puzzlement.

We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Mauide would yell back, Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they'll hear you the post office, I haven't heard you yet! Jem and I thought this a strange way to ask for a lady's hand in marriage, but then again Uncle Jack was rather strange.

People have a habit of doing everyday things even under the oddest conditions.

Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South's political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.

Thing is, foot-washers think women are a sin in definition.

Consequently, the town remained the same size for over 150 years. Its primary reason for existence was government. What saved it from becoming another grubby little Alabama community was that Maycomb's proportion of professional people ran high: one went to Maycomb to have his teeth pulled, his wagon fixed, his heart listened to, his money deposited, his mules vetted, his soul saved, his mortgage extended.

Miss Maudie settled her bridgework. "You know old Mr. Radley was a foot-washing Baptist—" "That's what you are, ain't it?" "My shell's not that hard, child. I'm just a Baptist." "Don't you all believe in foot-washing?" "We do. At home in the bathtub." "But we can't have communion with you all—

Maycomb County's home to me, honey. It's the best place I know to live in. I've built up a good record here from the time I was a kid. Maycomb knows me, and I know Maycomb. Maycomb trusts me, and I trust Maycomb. My bread and butter comes from this town, and Maycomb's given me a good living. But Maycomb asks certain things in return. It asks you to lead a reasonably clean life, it asks that you join the Kiwanis club, to go to church on Sunday, it asks you to conform to its ways ---

I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days.

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.

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o-clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea-cakes with frosting of sweat and sweet talcolm.

Before she dozed off, it occurred to her that for the first time in her life Calpurnia had said "Yes ma'am" and "Miss Scout" to her, forms of address usually reserved for the presence of high company.