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Harper Lee Quotes

Total quotes: 34
“Atticus said naming people after Confederate generals made slow steady drinkers.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Tagged: Confederacy, Civil War
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
Tagged: Banned Books
“Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it, hotheadedness isn't.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Tagged: Women's Strength
“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 quicker than adults, an evasion simply muddles 'em.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Well if you don’t want me to grow up talkin‘ that way, why do you send me to school?”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Apparently, Mayella's recital had given her confidence, but it was not her father's brash kind: there was something stealthy about hers, like a steady-eyed cat with a twitchy tail.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dinning-car window with a delight almost physical.”
— Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman: A Novel
Tagged: first lines of books, Atlanta
“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.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“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.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“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.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“reasonable men, they went because we were there. There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“When the new wore off his grandfather’s watch, and carrying it became a day’s burdensome task, Jem no longer felt the necessity of ascertaining the hour every five minutes.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
Tagged: Reading, Living, Books
“It's not time to worry yet.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
Tagged: worry, Future, Peace
“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. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“"An' they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things... Atticus, he was real nice..."
"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Slowly but surely I began to see the pattern of questions: from questions that Mr.Gilmer did not deem sufficiently irrelevant or immaterial to object to, Atticus was quietly building up before the jury the picture of the Ewell's home life.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Mount Everest: throughout my early life, she was cold and there.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“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.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... 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, To Kill a Mockingbird
“he said if enough people—a stadium full, maybe—were to concentrate on one thing, such as setting a tree afire in the woods, that the tree would ignite of its own accord. I toyed with the idea of asking everyone below to concentrate on setting Tom Robinson free, but”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“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. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Atticus said to Jem one day, ‘I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’ That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. ‘Your father’s right,’ she said. ‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, 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, To Kill a Mockingbird
Tagged: Greatest Quotes, Music, Mockingbird
“The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me — he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal — there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Each child was supposed to clip an item from a newspaper, absorb its contents, and reveal them to the class. This practice allegedly overcame a variety of evils: standing in front of his fellows encouraged good posture and gave a child poise; delivering a short talk made him word-conscious; learning his current event strengthened his memory; being singled out made him more than ever anxious to return to the Group.”
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
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