I can't beat you, I can't join you. - Harper Lee

I think I'll be a clown when I get grown, said Dill. Yes, sir, a clown.... There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off. You got it backwards, Dill, said Jem. Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them. Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.

Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.