"See there?" Jem was scowling triumphantly. "Nothin' to it. I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl its mortifyin"

A lady?' Jem raised his head. His face was scarlet. 'After all those things she said about you, a lady?'
'She was. She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe... son, I told you that if you hadn't lost your head I'd have made you go read to her. I wanted you to see something about her- I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.

"Can you be a girl for a few seconds?"
"I'm always a girl" I frown.
"You know what I mean. Like a silly, annoying girl"
I twirl my hair around my finger.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.

When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty.

When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative,

I’d been a girl forever, after all, familiar with and reliant upon the powers my very girlness granted me.

She thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don’t know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire.

I still feel like a young girl, as though everything is about to happen.

I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.

Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.

"A little girl robbed you?" Tessa said.
"Actually, she wasn’t a little girl at all, as it turns out, but a midget in a dress with a penchant for violence, who goes by the name of Six-Fingered Nigel."
"Easy mistake to make," Jem said.

because I was conditioned to think that people would hurt me if they didn’t like what I said or if my behavior didn’t align with what they wanted. Of course, I had to heal and