Quotes About Harper Lee

when I asked Atticus about it, he said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go on about my business, he didn't mind me much the way I was.

Through the weeks he had cultivated an expression of polite and detached interest, which he would present to her in answer to her most blood-curdling inventions.

Jem preached the longest, most tedious sermon she ever heard in her life. He said that sin was about the most sinful thing he could think of, and no one who sinned could be a success, and blessed was he who sat in the seat of the scornful; in short, he repeated his own version of everything they had heard for the past three nights.

I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing… is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this — the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea.

Jean Louise was accustomed to her uncle's brand of intellectual shorthand: it was his custom to state one or two isolated facts, and a conclusion seemingly unsupported thereby. Slowly and surely, if prodded correctly, Dr. Finch would unwind the reel of his strange lore to reveal reasoning that glittered with a private light of its own.

Atticus said no, it wasn't that sort of thing, that there were other ways of making people into ghosts.

One maniac and millions of German folks. Looked to me like they'd shut Hitler in a pen instead of letting him shut them up.

Mrs. Merriweather played her voice like an organ; every word she said received its full measure:

I never heard Atticus raise his voice in my life, except to a deaf woman.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree-house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colours in a parched landscape ; but most of all, summer was Dill.

There are no chic people in Texas.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn't have an eventful childhood.

I've always thought Harper Lee might have made a great decision. Much as you'd like to have more books by her, there's something about just one that's kind of mysterious and nice. On the other hand, the New York gossip about me was that I'd never write another book. So I thought, 'Well, I will then.'

Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' became iconic almost immediately after appearing in 1960: best-seller status; the Pulitzer Prize the next year; a classic movie soon after, with Gregory Peck in an Academy Award-winning role.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a classic portrait of the legacy of slavery and racial segregation in the South.