Harper Lee Quotes - Page 3

When Henry handed her a cup of punch she whispered, "If you want to go on with the seniors or anything I'll be alright."Henry smiled at her. "You're my date, Scout.

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

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.

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

You confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings – I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.

It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.

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

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

If he’s not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets—

In Maycomb, if one went for a walk with no definite purpose in mind, it was correct to believe one's mind incapable of definite purpose.

We came to the street light in the corner, and I wondered how many times Dill stood there hugging the fat pole, watching, waiting, hoping. I wondered how many times Jem and I had made this journey, but I entered the Radley front gate for the seecond time in my life. 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.Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: w had given him nothing, and it made me sad.

We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe. Some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cupcakes than others; some are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.

Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go and nothing to buy...and no money to buy it with.

He was letting you break your icons one by one. he was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being.

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.

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.

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

I do my best to love everybody...I'm hard put,sometimes- baby,its never an insult o be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is,it doesn't hurt you.

There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one.

They had never been able to sustain fifteen minutes’ conversation with one another without advancing irreconcilable points of view, invigorating in friendships, but in close blood relations producing only uneasy cordiality.

I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church--was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. 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. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words. But I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.