HLHarper Lee

138 collected words

Harper Lee

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

▷ Play this voice Search these words ↗Place in time ↗life justice truth wealth courage knowledge time mind

Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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 / quote

02Undated

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

Harper Lee / quote

03Undated

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 / quote

04Undated

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 / quote

05Undated

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 / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

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 / quote

08Undated

Things are always better in the morning.

Harper Lee / quote

09Undated

...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 / quote

10Undated

We can't always have our druthers.

Harper Lee / quote

11Undated

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 / quote

12Undated

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 / quote

13Undated

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

Harper Lee / quote

14Undated

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 / quote

15Undated

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 / quote

16Undated

...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 / quote

17Undated

...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 / quote

18Undated

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 / quote

19Undated

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

Harper Lee / quote

20Undated

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.

Harper Lee / quote

21Undated

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.

Harper Lee / quote

22Undated

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

Harper Lee / quote

23Undated

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.

Harper Lee / quote

24Undated

I wanted you to see something about her—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 you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.

Harper Lee / quote