Quotes from Harper Lee

An' they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those thing... Atticus, he was real nice.. Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them. He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

There was nowhere to go, but I turned to go and met Atticus's vest front. I buried my head in it and listened to the small internal noises that went on behind the light blue cloth: his watch ticking, the faint crackle of his starched shirt, the soft sound of his breathing. 'Your stomach's growling,' I said. 'I know it,' he said.

But at supper that evening after I asked him to pass the damn ham, please, Uncle Jack pointed at me. 'See me afterwards young lady,' he said.

I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work.

but you see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that's the way I want to live.

Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were bloodstained - if you ate animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.

Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves.

I heard 'Equal rights for all; special privileges for none,' and to me it didn't mean anything but what it said.

Madam, my father has left me flopping like a flounder at low tide and you say what's the matter.

I guess when you're hurt your first instinct's to hurt back.

He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of gray house with sad brown doors.

Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How's your entailment gettin' along?

No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change

I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man.

And for goodness' sake put some of the county back where it belongs, the soil erosion's bad enough as it is. Dill stared at my father's retreating figure. He's trying tryin' to be funny, I said.

Lawyers, I suppose were once children, too

Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.

Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies - Scout

But the white supremacists fear reason, because they know cold reason beats them. Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

She's an old lady and she's ill. You just hold your head high and be a gentleman. Whatever she says to you, it's your job not to let her make you mad.

Aunty," she said, cordially, "why don't you go pee in your hat?

Folks were doin' a lot of runnin' that night

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read

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.