Quotes from Harper Lee

I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days.

But I don't get the connection. Dr. Finch put his hands on the table. 'That's because you haven't looked,' he said. 'You've never opened your eyes.

Don't argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him.

You know he wouldn't carry a gun, Scout. He ain't even got one—" said Jem. "You know he didn't even have one down at the jail that night. He told me havin' a gun around's an invitation to somebody to shoot you.

You got it backwards, Dill,' said Jem. 'Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them.

She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way.

Well, Dill, after all he's just a Negro." "I don't care one speck. It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way. Hasn't anybody got any business talkin' like that—it just makes me sick." "That's

Had I ever harbored the mystical notions about mountains that seem to obsess lawyers and judges, Aunt Alexandra would have been analogous to Mount Everest: throughout my early life, she was cold and there.

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.

Ci sono degli uomini... che si preoccupano tanto dell'altro mondo da non imparare mai a vivere in questo.

seemed to have little fear of Boo Radley now that Walter and I walked beside him. Indeed, Jem grew boastful:

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.

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.

Little Chuck grinned broadly. "There ain't no need to fear a cootie, ma'am. Ain't you ever seen one? Now don't you be afraid, you just go back to your desk and teach us some more.

No votee, no eatee.

Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

I thought women liked to be thought strange and mysterious." "No, they just like to look strange and mysterious. When you get past all the boa feathers, every woman born in this world wants a strong man who knows her like a book, who's not only her lover but he who keepeth Israel.

I don't know if I can tell you, honey. When you live in New York, you often have the feeling that New York's not the world. I mean this: every time I come home, I feel like I'm coming back to the world, and when I leave Maycomb it's like leaving the world. It's silly. I can't explain it, and what makes it sillier is that I'd go stark raving living in Maycomb.

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.

about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people, too.

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.

Uncle Jack, I can't live in a place that I don't agree with and that doesn't agree with me.

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o-clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea-cakes with frosting of sweat and sweet talcolm.

You deny them hope... You are telling them that Jesus loves them, but not much.