Quotes from Harper Lee

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.

Kau tidak akan bisa memahami seseorang sebelum kau melihat segala sesuatu dari sudut pandangnya

I know what you mean, boy...You aren't thin-hided, it just makes you sick, doesn't it?

I was scared, suh. - Why were you scared? - Mr Finch if you was a nigger like me you'd be scared, too.

Oh, not the kind of courage that makes a soldier go across no-man's land. That's the kind that he summons up because he has to. This kind is- well, it is part of one's will to live, part of one's instinct for self-preservation. Sometimes, we have to kill a little so we can live, when we don't-when women don't, they cry themselves to sleep and have their mothers wash out their hose every day.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another they are Communists.

Los payasos son hombres tristes; es la gente la que se ríe de ellos. —Bien

I'm Charles Baker Harris, he said, and I can read.

Atticus, you are rewriting history." "No I'm not. It might benefit you to go back and have a look at what some of our founding fathers really believed, instead of relying so much on what people these days tell you they believed.

Atticus said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr. Cunningham displayed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.

The only reason Henry's like he is now is because your father took him in hand when he was a boy, and because the war came along and paid for his education. Fine a boy as he is, the trash won't wash out of him.

You deny them hope. Any man in this world, Atticus, any man who has a head and arms and legs, was born with hope in his heart. You won't find that in the Constitution, I picked that up in church somewhere. They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn't make them subhuman. "You

Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. Let the dead bury the dead.

She died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew. - Atticus Finch

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. He would protect her; he would marry her.

Atticus had owned an old canvas-top touring car, and once when he was taking Jem, Henry, and Jean Louise swimming, the car rolled over a particularly bad hump in the road and deposited Jem without.

Dear goodness, the things I learned. I did not want my world disturbed, but I wanted to crush the man who's trying to preserve it for me. I wanted to stamp out all the people like him. I guess it's like an airplane: they're the drag and we're the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we're nose-heavy, too much of them and we're tail-heavy—it's a matter of balance. I can't beat him, and

Dr. Finch looked up. "You're making a bad mistake if you think your daddy's dedicated to keeping the Negroes in their places.

You'll get your head shot off, Jem.

When my brother Jem was 13, he had his arm badly broken at the elbow.

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 fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom." "It's the same thing. Humility.

She knocked and went in. Atticus was in bed reading. "Have a good time?" "I had a won-derful time," she said. "Atticus?" "Hm?

cuando más te necesitan tus amigos es cuando se equivocan, Jean Louise, no cuando tienen razón.

Do you defend niggers, Atticus?' I asked him that evening. 'Of course I do. Don't say nigger, Scout. That's common.' ''s what everybody at schools says.' 'From now on it'll be everybody less one -' 'Well if you don't want me to grow up talkin' that way, wh ydo you send me to school?