Harper Lee quotes:

I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.

Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How's your entailment gettin' along?

I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you're working at home they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn't dream of interrupting on the golf course.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Folks don't like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

About your writing with you left hand, are you ambidextrous, Mr. Ewell?" "I most positively am not, I can use one hand good as the other. One hand good as the other.

The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets -

Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children. ~To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 16, spoken by the character Atticus

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know--doesn't say much for them, does it?

Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.

Atticus said naming people after Confederate generals made slow steady drinkers.

Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.

Alexandra had been married for thirty-three years; if it had made any impression on her one way or another, she never showed it.

They're ugly, but those are the facts of life.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

It's not necessary to tell all you know.

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

It's better to be silent than to be a fool.

baby, it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you. So don't let Mrs Dubose get you down. She had enough troubles or her own.

I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference.

Honey, the sun rises and sets with that Bill of hers. Everything he says is Gospel. She loves her man.Is that what loving your man is?Has a lot to do with it.Jean Louise said, You mean losing your own identity, don't you?In a way, yes, said Henry. Then I doubt if I shall ever marry.

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."

You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat. Try fightin' with your head for a change. -Atticus Finch

hold your head high and keep those fists down - Atticus Finch

I had never thought about it, but summer was Dill by the fishpool smoking string, Dill's eyes alive with complicated plans to make Boo Radley emerge; summer was the swiftness with which Dill would reach up and kiss me when Jem was not looking, the longings we sometimes felt each other feel. With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable..." - Scout Finch

I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.

...but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.

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.

I think I'll be a clown when I get grown.... 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.

There was nowhere to go, but I turned to go and met Atticus's vest front. I buried my head in it and listened to the small internal noises that went on behind the light blue cloth: his watch ticking, the faint crackle of his starched shirt, the soft sound of his breathing. 'Your stomach's growling,' I said. 'I know it,' he said.

Summer, and he watches his children's heart break. Autumn again and Boo's children needed him. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up - some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood,

As a reader I loathe introductions...Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.

He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside.

No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system - that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality.

You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself.

Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a Klan... The Ku Klux's gone... It'll never come back.

It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike -- in the second place, folks don't like to have someone around knowin' more than they do. It aggravates them. Your not gonna change any of them by talkin' right, they've got to want to learn themselves, and when they don't want to learn there's nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.

It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike--in the second place, folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do.

Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.

Never, never, never on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to, was a tenet I absorbed with my baby food. Do it, and you'll often get an answer you don't want.

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?

Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves.

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 see it through no matter what.- Atticus Finch

Thought you could kill my Snow-on-the-Mountain, did you? Well, Jessie says that the top's growing back out. Next time you'll know how to do it right, won't you? You'll pull it up by the roots, won't you?

One must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.

As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don't think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, 'I'm probably no better than you, but I'm certainly your equal.

Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.

They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn't make them subhuman.You are telling them Jesus loves them, but not much.

Then Mr. Underwood's meaning became clear: Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case.

I had never encountered a being who deliberately perpetuated fraud against himself.

...baby, it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you. So don't let Mrs Dubose get you down. She had enough troubles or her own.

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.

I wanted you see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.

Every man's island, Jean Louise, every man's watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscience.

As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he'll look for his lessons.

So far nothing in your life has interfered with your reasoning process.

Don't matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house's yo' comp'ny, and don't you let me catch you remarkin' on their ways like you was so high and and mighty! Yo' folks might be better'n the Cunninghams but it don't count for nothin' the way you're disgracin' 'em.

When she looked thus, only God and Robert Browning knew what she was likely to say.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.

I just know Maycomb. I'm not in the least sensitive about it, but good Lord, I'm certainly aware of it.

With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.

We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.

You see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that's the way I want to live.

I don't hafta take his sass

Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces.

Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.

Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.

summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed 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.

My book had a universal theme. It's not a "racial" novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.

Jen and I were accustomed to our father's last-will-and-testament diction, and were at times free to interrupt Atticus for a translation when it was beyond our understanding.

Wordsworth was right when he said that we trail clouds of glory as we come into the world, that we are born with a divine sense of perception. As we grow older, the world closes in on us, and we gradually lose the freshness of viewpoint that we had as children. That is why I think children should get to know this country while they are young.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Well, they're Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn't dream of interrupting you at golf.

From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

...but sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down...

...in other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama Interview - March 1964

Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.

As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.

Atticus said that Jem was trying hard to forget something, but what he was really doing was storing it away for a while, until enough time passed. Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out. When he was able to think about it, Jem would be himself again.

Atticus, he was real nice." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.

Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it.

Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I've tried to live so I can look squarely back at him.

Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings.

Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open.

Calpurnia evidently remembered a rainy Sunday when we were both fatherless and teacherless. Let to its own devices, the class tied Eunice Ann Simpson to a chair and placed her in the furnace room. We forgot her, trooped upstairs to church, and were listening quietly to the sermon when a dreadful banging issued from the radiator pipes, persisting until someone investigated and brought forth Eunice Ann saying she didn't want to play Shadrach any more - Jem Finch said she wouldn't get burnt if she had enough faith, but it was hot down there.

Cecil Jacobs is a big wet hen!

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

Dill if you don't hush I'll knock you bowlegged.

Dill said striking a match under a turtle was hateful. "How do you know a match don't hurt him?" "Turtles can't feel, stupid," said Jem. "Where you ever a turtle, huh?

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.

Don't talk like that, Dill," said Aunt Alexandra. "It's not becoming to a child. It's "? cynical." "I ain't cynical, Miss Alexandra. Tellin' the truth's not cynical, is it?" "The way you tell it, it is.

Don't you study about other folks's business till you take care of your own.

Everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowing.

Finders were keepers unless title was proven.

Folks were doin' a lot of runnin' that night

For the life of me, I did not understand how he[Atticus] could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic.

Havin' a gun around's an invitation to somebody to shoot you.

I came to the conclusion that people were just peculiar, I withdrew from them, and never thought about them until I was forced to.

I could think of nothing else to say to her. In fact I could never think of anything to say to her, and I sat thinking of past painful conversations between us: How are you, Jean Louise? Fine, thank you ma'am, how are you? Very well, thank you; what have you been doing with yourself? Nothin'. Don't you do anything? Nome. Certainly you have friends? Yessum. Well what do you all do? Nothin'.

I didn't expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.