Top 50 Quotes You Need for Your Essay from Jasper Jones

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#11: “I don’t understand a thing about this world: about people, and why they do the things they do. The more I find out, the more I uncover, the more I know, the less I understand.”

• Chapter 6 
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin 
• Techniques: Irony

#12: “I observe Jeffery standing apart from the group sucking at a plastic cup as the rest of the team forms a circle that excludes him.”

• Chapter 6 
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Symbolism of Jeffrey’s alienation (and racial injustice) 

#13: “Every character in every story is buffeted between good and bad, between right and wrong. But it’s good people who can tell the difference, who know when they’ve crossed the line. And it’s a hard and humbling gesture, to take the blame and admit fault. You’ve got to get brave to say it and mean it. Sorry. Sorry.”

• Chapter 6
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Dichotomies, recurring motif

#14: “If you’re capable of that kind of evil, can you be capable of an equal share of remorse?”

• Chapter 6
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Rhetorical question

#15: “I also have a suspicion that Eliza might be less concerned with what’s right, less concerned about uncovering the truth, than she is about ensuring that she and Jasper Jones, and maybe her father, too, are meted out the penance that she feels they each deserve. I think she wants to do something with all this blame and hurt. I think she just wants to tie rocks to all their feet.”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin 
• Techniques: figurative language

#16: “When she fell pregnant, Jack Lionel railed hard against it… dirtying the family name.”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Metaphor

#17: “I killed her, Charlie. It’s like if you just watch someone drown from the shore without swimming out to help them. That’s what I did. It’s my fault.”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Eliza Wishart
• Techniques: Simile

#18: “Laura Wishart wasn’t kidnapped by Mad Jack Lionel. But it seems she was snatched away by something infinitely more sinister and terrifying… the same thing that’s thieved my appetite… the thing that makes this town so quick to…point its finger…”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Repetition, Gothic fiction trope

#19: “I think how different everything would have been… I would have been free of all this. I would have stayed safe in my room… I would have woken up like I used to. None the riser. Much the lighter.”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Truncated sentences, repetition

#20: “Sorry”

• Recurring (Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8)
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Recurring motif, symbolism (of morality, redemption, and remorse)

#21: “The world isn’t right. It’s small and it’s nasty and it’s lousy with sadness.”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Emotive language, truncated sentences

#22: “Because Jeffrey Lu was a hero today and…and they dragged him back to the bottom… Because those men struck his father, over and over, and they destroyed something beautiful. And nothing will ever happen to them… Because a girl goes missing in this town and it is Jasper Jones who is held and threatened…Because now…”

• Chapter 6
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Repetition

#23: “I still feel the need to tell her. To unburden us both. To assure her I tried to do the right thing. To etch that word.”

• Chapter 6
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin 
• Techniques: Truncated sentences

#24: “The people behind me start murmuring about how it must have started… And then somebody says it, like I knew they would… like I knew they would. And of course it’s given more credence than it could possibly deserve. When I hear his [Jasper Jones’] name, there’s that lump in my throat again…”

• Chapter 9 
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Repetition

Truth and Honesty 

#25: “I was terrified, but something kicked in me. I discovered a gift for lies. I looked straight at them and offered up the best story I could muster. It was like I’d clicked opened my suitcase and started spinning a thread at my desk. Weaving between the factual and the fictional. It was factitious.”

• Chapter 6
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Metaphor, simile, figurative language

#26: “…there’s always more to know. Always. The mystery just gets covered in history. Or is it the other way around. It gets wrested and wrapped in some other riddle. And I think of Jenny Likens, who also watched her sister die, who said nothing until the end, who got brave too late.”

• Chapter 9 
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Figurative language

#27: “I’m not sure where to look. The water, Eliza, the glade. There are lies everywhere.”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Hyperbolic language

#28: “Under every rock, hidden in every closet, shaken from every tree, it seems there’s something horrible I don’t want to see. I don’t know.”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin 
• Techniques: Hyperbole, metaphorical language

#29: “I know the sad truth. About everything. Jasper, Laura, my mother. It’s all come to light, it’s all been bared, and it’s bowed my shoulders so much I’m too tired to be afraid anymore.”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Figurative language

#30: “Maybe that’s why this town is so content to face in on itself, to keep everything so settled and smooth and serene. And at the moment, I can’t say as I blame them.”

• Chapter 7
• Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Descriptive language, alliteration

#31: “I think Jasper Jones speaks the whole truth in a town of Liars”

• Chapter 2
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: hyperbolic language

#32: “This makes no sense: to cover this with lies to uncover the truth”

• Chapter 1
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Juxtaposition

#33: “I’m asking her to lie. I’m asking her to pull a blanket over parts of this story… Just so I can stay clean. So Jasper Jones can be given a reprieve… And I feel terrible. But what’s right and just and true here anyway?”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Figurative language, rhetorical question

#34: “There is something emboldening about being awake when the rest of the world is sleeping. Like I know something they don’t.”

• Chapter 1 
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Simile

#35: I think about Eliza’s manner. So dry and centered. So matter-of-fact amid the panic… And then, swift as a knife, it occurs to me. A rash of sparks coats my skin. My heart almost leaps from my chest, and my brick slides. Eliza Wishart knows something.

• Chapter 3
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin 
• Techniques: Simile, figurative language

Coming of Age

#36: “This shouldn’t be our responsibility. It shouldn’t be our hideous problem to solve. We should be able to pass this to the right people. We should be able to run like frightened kids, to point and pant and cower someplace safe.”

• Chapter 1
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: First person plural narrative voice

#37: “See, most people you meet, they’ll talk to you through fifty layers of gauze and tinting. Sometimes you know they’re lying even before they’ve started speaking. And it seems the older they get, the more brazen and desperate folks become, and they lie about things that don’t even matter.”

• Chapter 2 
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Figurative language

#38: “How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snowdome paper weight that’s been shaken. There’s a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it’s now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris.” 

• Chapter 1
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin 
• Techniques: Simile 

#39: “To pilfer and eat a peach from the property of Mad Jack Lionel assures you instant royalty. The stone of the peach is kept as a souvenir of heroics, and is universally admired and envied.”

• Chapter 1
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Symbolism of peaches

#40: “And the peaches do feel good. I’m proud to be clutching them, because I know what it took, and it felt as though a weight had shifted as soon as I had them in my hands.”

• Chapter 9
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Symbolism of peaches

#41: “But what no spectator that day will ever know or anyone who will later lend their ear to an account, is that it requires more courage for me to tentatively bend and snatch up that rotten fruit from amid that sea of bees. My hands tremble. I can barely work my fingers. But I get them…”

• Chapter 9 
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Symbolism of peaches

#42: This is what happened. And I’ve got to get it out quick… I can’t hold on to it for too long because it’ll burn. Do you understand? It’s the knowing. It’s always the knowing that’s the worst. I wish I didn’t have to. I want the stillness back. But I can’t. I can’t ever get it back. So. Thisiswhathappened.

• Chapter 7 
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin 
• Techniques: Figurative language, eye dialect

#43: “I haven’t ever felt like a kid Charlie, You don’t unnerstand. I bin lookin after myself since I can remember…Everyone can learn a trade and pay taxes and have a family. But that’s not growin up. It’s about how you act when your s*** gets shaken up, it’s about how much you see around you. That’s what makes a man…”

• Chapter 5
• Characters: Jasper Jones
• Techniques: Eye dialect

Sympathy, Empathy and Understanding

#44: “But in order to be useful to Jasper, I had to be even-handed and logical, like Atticus, like my dad.” 

• Chapter 6
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Literary allusion 

#45: “Strangely, of all the horrible things I’ve encountered and considered recently, dropping a bomb seems to be the least violent among them, even though it’s clearly the worst…There’s something clean about all that distance. Maybe the further away you are, the less you have to care, the less you’re responsible. But that seems wrong to me…But if they weren’t Jeffrey’s family, would I care so much?”

• Chapter 4
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Contrast 

#46: “I’ve done everything wrong. Mad Jack Lionel isn’t a criminal. He’s probably not even mad. He’s just old and sad and poor and lonely.”

• Chapter 7
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Contrast

#47: “Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people’s pain, as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it.”

• Chapter 6
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Figurative language, recurring motif

#48: “I feel like a spoiled little bastard, about to crawl into my safe nest, while Jasper Jones shoulders his burden alone…I want to invite Jasper in, give him my bed…”

• Chapter 1
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Contrast

#49: “But I hoped you might see things from my end. That’s what you do, right? When you’re readin. You’re seeing what it’s like for other people.”

• Chapter 1
• Characters: Jasper Jones
• Techniques: Allusion (To Kill a Mockingbird), dialogue, eye dialect

#50: “Jasper Jones has lost his girl… It seems so infinitely sad to me, I can’t even imagine. To lose someone so close, someone he had his hopes pinned on… But Jasper Jones has to keep that poker face. He has to throw that cloak over his heart. I wonder how much of Jasper’s life is spent pretending he doesn’t give a s***.”

• Chapter 5
• Characters: Charlie Bucktin
• Techniques: Figurative language, emotive language