Harper Lee Quotes

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.

~ Harper Lee

It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing, keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess.

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

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, and you can look down the street and see the results.

~ Harper Lee

I mean this: every time I come home, I feel like I'm coming back to the world, and when I leave Macomb it's like leaving the world.

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

Whether Maycomb knows it or not, we're paying the highest tribute we can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.''Who?' Aunt Alexandra never knew she was echoing her twelve-year-old nephew.'The handful of people in this town who that that fair play is not marked White Only; the handful of people who say a fair trial is for everybody, not just us; the handful of people with enough humility to think, when they look at a Negro, there but for the Lord's kindness am I.

~ Harper Lee

I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but i know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.....Mockingbirds don't do one thing to but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's garden, 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.

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days. You don't have it yet, but you have a shadow of the beginnings of it. You haven't the humbleness of mind- I thought the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom.It's the same thing. Humility.

~ Harper Lee

Things are always better in the morning.

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

...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.

~ Harper Lee

We can't always have our druthers.

~ Harper Lee

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

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

As Kipling said, that’s another story...

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

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.

~ Harper Lee

...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.

~ Harper Lee

...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.

~ Harper Lee

I willed myself to stay awake, but the rain was so soft and the room was so warm and his voice was so deep and his knee was so snug that I slept.

~ Harper Lee