Quotes from Harper Lee

The cold water embraced hime like no woman ever could

If a man says to you, This is the truth, and you believe him, and you discover what he says is not the truth, you are disappointed and you make sure you will not be caught by him again. But a man who has lived the truth--and you have believed in what he has lived--he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing.

She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person. She was afflicted with a restlessness of spirit he could not guess at, but he knew she was the one for him.

Lightning rods guarding some graves denoted dead who rested uneasily; stumps of burned-out candles stood at the heads of infant graves. It was a happy cemetery.

You won't find better people than in New York.

Recorded history's version does not coincide with the truth, but these are the facts, because they were passed down by word of mouth through the years, and every Maycombian knows them.

Love's the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it's a you-do or you-don't proposition with them all.

The easy way out of this would be to marry Hank and let him labor for her. After a few years, when the children were waist-high, the man would come along whom she should have married in the first place. There would be searchings of hearts, fevers and frets, long looks at each other on the post office steps, and misery for everybody.

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, Chapter 9, spoken by the character Atticus

Of course Jem antagonized me sometimes until I could kill him, but when it came down to it he was all I had.

Io ne tirai la conclusione che la gente era stramba, e basta.

All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbours was that, if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white.

What would Atticus do?" passed through her unconscious; she never realized what made her dig in her feet and stand firm whenever she did was her father; that whatever was decent and of good report in her character was put there by her father; she did not know that she worshiped him.

Te digan lo que te digan, no permitas que te hagan perder los nervios. Procura luchar con el cerebro, para variar...

said Atticus, "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.

I just don't like my world disturbed without some warning.

Prije nego što mogu živjeti s drugima, moram mo?i živjeti sam sa sobom.

He's the same in the court-room as he is on the public streets.

Nearly never kills a bird

It seems quixotic today, with jet airplanes and overdoses of Nembutal, that a man would go through a war for something so insignificant as his state.

You can't go around making caricatures of the neighbors.

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.

on what we heard—" "Now don't you be so confident, Mr. Jem, I ain't ever seen any jury decide in favor of a colored man over a white man. . . ." But Jem took exception to Reverend Sykes, and we were subjected to a lengthy review of the evidence with Jem's ideas on the law regarding rape: it wasn't rape if she let you, but she had to be eighteen—in Alabama

This time we aren't fighting the Yankees, we're fighting our friends. But remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they're still our friends and this is still our home.