Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Courage




These words get to me every time I read them.  In my sophomore year of high school, To Kill a Mockingbird was our summer reading for English.  I loved the book from the start, but the way my teacher talked about it transformed the story even further, and I fell head over heels with every moment bound in the text.  My teacher quoted the last few lines from the book with regularity: "Courage is when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what."

These words became exponentially more precious to me at the end of that school year.  I just wrote the story of what happened and then erased every word.  The sentences I put together to capture that story and that teacher in writing weren't right.  I'll have to try again.


I found this image and quote on my friend's Pinterest.  Does anyone know where it's from?  I did a google image search and haven't find an original source yet.

3 comments:

Ana Degenaar said...

Such a powerful post. I loved it. Thank you!

Lillian C said...

I loved "To Kill A Mockingbird". Atticus Finch is one of my favorite characters in literature! And what a great quote. It really is such a simple way to frame what courage really is - isn't it crazy how easy it is to forget?

I'll look forward to reading your story & how this quote became so important to you! :)

Joanna said...

To Kill a Mockingbird really is one of the all time greats, isn't it? The year my son did it for an exam, our whole family read it on holiday. We had so many great conversations about issues like prejudice and family and parenting.I love it when a book becomes a kind of extra person we can all relate around.