Harper Lee Quotes - Page 2

(...) when a man's looking down the double barrel of a shotgun, he picks up the first weapon he can find to defend himself, be it a stone or a stick of stove wood or a citizens' council.

Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming in the middle of the river last night with no clothes on.H'rm, said Atticus. He touched his glasses. I hope you weren't doing the backstroke.

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.

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

I wonder how much of the day I spend just callin' after you.

...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.

It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made bearable.

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. 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, that white man is trash.

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick

If we followed our feelings all the time we´d be like cats chasin´ their tails.

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

You deny them hope... You are telling them that Jesus loves them, but not much.

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

Never, never, never, on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to.

...but 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.

We’re so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we’ve got men like Atticus to go for us.

I think there might be a better way,change the law

The only thing I'm afraid of about this country is that it's government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn't be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won't be that way much longer.

...summer was the swiftness with which Dill would reach up and kiss me when Jem was not looking, the longing we sometimes felt each other feel. With him life was routine; without him life was unbearable.

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, that white man is trash

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.

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.

She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.

You never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.

We can't always have our druthers.

Scout- .. Uncle Jack?"Uncle Jack- "Ma'am?"Scout- "What's a whore-lady?

Whatever she says to you, it’s your jobnot to let her make you mad.

In their own way, Tom Robinson's manners were as good as Atticus's

Ladies pick funny things to be proud of.

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.

How could this be so, I wondered, as I read Mr. Underwood's editorial. Senseless killing--Tom had been given due process of law to the day of his death; he had been tried openly and convicted by twelve good men and true; my father had fought for him all the way. 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. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.

She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it. She persisted, and her subsequent reaction is something that all of us have known at one time or another. She did something every child has done-she tried to put the evidence of her offense away from her. But in this case she was no child hiding stolen contraband: she struck out at her victim-of necessity she must put him away from her-he must be removed from her presence, from this world. She must destroy the evidence of her offense.

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

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

I do wish this time you'd try to dress better while you're home. Folks in town get the wrong impression of you. They think you are--ah--slumming.

Let the dead bury the dead...

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

The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they can't scare us with the essential inferiority line, they'll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that's the only thing they know is feared in our fundamentalist hearts down here.

I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.

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

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

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

Boo and I walked up the steps to the porch. His fingers found the doorknob. He gently released my hand, opened the door, enter inside, and shut the door behind him. I never saw him again.

The only thing I'm afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn't be worth living in

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a court-room, be heany colour of the rainbow, but people have way to carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

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

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

Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence. She was a Graham from Montgomery; Atticus met her when he was first elected to the state legislature. He was middle-aged then, she was fifteen years his junior. Jem was the product of their first year of marriage; four years later I was born, and two years later our mother died from a sudden heart attack. They said it ran in her family. I did not miss her, but I think Jem did. He remembered her clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then go off and play by himself behind the car-house. When he was like that, I knew better than to bother him.

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 evasionquicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ‘em. No, you had the right answer this afternoon, but the wrong reasons. Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re notattracting attention with it. Hotheadedness isn’t.

She was the bravest person I ever knew.

It's not time to worry yet

The gum looked fresh. I sniffed it and it smelled all right. I licked it and waited for a while. When I did not die, I crammed it into my mouth: Wrigley's Double Mint.

I was more at home in my father's world. People like Mr. Heck Tate did not trap you with innocent questions to make fun of you; even Jem was not highly critical unless you said something stupid. Ladies seemed to live in faint horror of men, seemed unwilling to approve wholeheartedly of them. But I liked them. There was something about them, no matter how much they cussed and drank and gambled and chewed; no matter how undelectable they were, there was something about them that I instinctively liked... they weren't—"Hypocrites, Mrs. Perkins, born hypocrites," Mrs. Merriweather was saying.

Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.