Quotes from Harper Lee

I can take anything anybody calls me so long as it's not true.

The only way in which all men in America are equal, is in the courtroom - Atticus

No, Jem, io credo che la gente sia di un tipo solo: gente, e basta! [...] E' quel che pensavo anch'io quando avevo la tua età disse infine. Ma se gli uomini fossero di un tipo solo, come ti spieghi che non vanno mai d'accordo tra loro? Se son tutti uguali perché passano la vita a disprezzarsi a vicenda?

They said if he'd had two good arms he'd have made it, he was moving that fast. Seventeen bullet holes in him. They didn't have to shoot him that much.

Do you really think so?

Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. She was even lonelier than Boo Radley, who had not been out of the house in twenty-five years.

People's attitudes toward the duties of a government have changed. The have-nots have risen and have demanded and received their due—sometimes more than their due. The haves are restricted from getting more. You are protected from the winter winds of old age, not by yourself voluntarily, but by a government that says we do not trust you to provide for yourself, therefore we will make you save.

she would have pondered over the meaninglessness of silent, austere beauty renewing itself with every sunrise and going ungazed at by half the world.

Para mí es un misterio que sigan portándose tan bien después de llevar cien años soportando que les nieguen sistemáticamente que son seres humanos.

Sherlock Holmes and Jem Finch would agree.

Isn't it about time you got over that? Bury your dead, Jean Louise.

I think maybe he put his gun down when he realized that God had given him an unfair advantage over most living things.

The dark tower. Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

Apparently deciding what it was easier to define primitive baptistry than closed communion, Miss Maudie said: 'Foot-washers believe anything that's pleasure is a sin. Did you know some of 'em came out of the woods one Saturday and passed by this place and told me me and my flowers were going to hell?' 'Your flowers, too?' 'Yes ma'am, They'd burn right with me. They thought I spent too much time in God's outdoors and not enough time inside the house reading the Bible.

I'll never forgive you for what you did to me. You cheated me, you've driven me out of my home and now I'm in a no-man's-land but good—there's no place for me any more in Maycomb, and I'll never be entirely at home anywhere else.

As I sit here and breathe, I never thought the good God would let me live to see someone walk into the middle of a revolution, pull a lugubrious face, and say, 'What's the matter?

I'd be churched to death, bridge-partied to death, called upon to give book reviews at the Amanuensis Club, expected to become a part of the community. It takes a lot of what I don't have to be a member of this wedding.

They have manners, Claudine. They're just different from ours. The person who pushed me on the bus expected to be pushed back. That's what I was supposed to do; it's just a game. You won't find better people than in New York.

Her favorite game was golf because its essential principles consisted of a stick, a small ball, and a state of mind.

But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men. 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.

Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?" Atticus put his face in my hair and rubbed it. When he got up and walked across the porch into the shadows, his youthful step had returned. Before he went inside the house, he stopped in front of Boo Radley. "Thank you for my children, Arthur," he said.

Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present?

Pleading's little more than putting on paper what you want to say.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.