Quotes About Harper Lee

#1. I would say what was always on her[Harper Lee] mind was the stories she had to tell, and the story was pretty obvious in "To Kill A Mockingbird," maybe a bit - little bit less obvious and more obscure in "Go Set A Watchman."

Wayne Flynt

#2. wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. - ATTICUS FINCH, FROM HARPER LEE'S TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Kristin Hannah

#3. I interviewed - no - had lunch with Harper Lee several years ago, trying to convince Harper Lee to do "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the book club. She wouldn't do it. She said, "Honey, I said everything I wanted to say."

Oprah Winfrey

#4. Harper Lee was legendarily private. I've never known such a private woman in my life. It's no surprise that she left Monroeville, a gossipy little southern town where everybody wants to know everybody's business, and went to the most anonymous city in America.

Wayne Flynt

#5. What I can tell you is DO IT. Publish book one and get book two out as soon as possible. There are very few Harper Lee's. Most of us are going to have to write a few books to get good at it.

Dan Alatorre

#6. I have 'To Kill A Mockingbird' signed by Harper Lee. That is my prized possession.

Nancy Grace

#7. Bloom County was set in a tidy, rural environment probably because of Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'

Berkeley Breathed

#8. Harper Lee was my David Bowie, and I feel her loss in my bones.

Margaret Stohl

#9. (What was there for Harper Lee to be afraid of, after all? Possibly just this: That she could not outdo Harper Lee.)

Elizabeth Gilbert

#10. Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.- Atticus Finch
RIP Harper Lee

Harper Lee

#11. If John Grisham, Harper Lee, and Larry the Cable Guy were penned up in a remote cabin for a weekend with nothing but good bourbon, fine wine, and a couple of cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, something like Common Pleas (A Tale of Whoa!) might result...

J. Randolph Cresenzo

#12. Everyone reads Harper Lee personally. For me, 'Mockingbird' was about admitting my own hyphenated identity - about loving and hating my world, about both belonging and not belonging to the community I came from.

Margaret Stohl

#13. My favorite book is 'To Kill A Mockingbird' by Harper Lee. It is multi-layered, and I see something new in it every time I read it.

Kimberly Willis Holt

#14. But she knew that her father's presence at the table with a man who spewed filth from his mouth - did that make it less filthy? No. it condoned.

Harper Lee

#15. 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." Atticus

Harper Lee

#16. The thing is, what I'm tryin' to say is -
they do get on a lot better without me, I can't help them any. They ain't mean. They buy me everything I want, but it's now - you've-got-it-go-play-with-it. You've got a roomful of things. I-got-you-that-book-so-go-read-it.

Harper Lee

#17. We're all of us going to hell, it's just a question of time.

Harper Lee

#18. 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.

Harper Lee

#19. I wonder what would happen if the South had a 'Be Kind to the Niggers Week'?

Harper Lee

#20. She had two minutes of peace before yesterday returned: nothing can kill the pleasure of one's first cigarette on a new morning. Jean Louise blew smoke carefully into the still air. She

Harper Lee

#21. It ain't time to worry yet. I'll let you know when.

Harper Lee

#22. You aren't thin-hided, it just makes you sick, doesn't it?

Harper Lee

#23. First thing you learn when you're in a lawin' family is that there ain't any definite answers to anything.

Harper Lee

#24. In favor of southern womanhood as much as anybody, but not for preserving polite fiction at the expense of human life.

Harper Lee

#25. 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.

Harper Lee

#26. But things like long life 'n' good health, 'n' passin' six-weeks tests . . .

Harper Lee

#27. Talking to Francis gave me the sensation of settling slowly to the bottom of the ocean.

Harper Lee

#28. Anywhere in town, kept to themselves, a predilection

Harper Lee

#29. Things are always better in the morning.

Harper Lee

#30. As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County School system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

Harper Lee

#31. Her victim - of necessity she must put him away from her - he must be removed from her presence, from this world. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. What was

Harper Lee

#32. They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it
seems that only the children weep. Good night.

Harper Lee

#33. Said once, that the only real duties of government were to prevent crime and preserve contracts, to which I will add one thing since I find myself reluctantly in the twentieth century: and to provide for the common defense.

Harper Lee

#34. I'm no different from any other woman, and the wrong man would turn me into a screamin' shrew in record time.

Harper Lee

#35. Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I've tried to live so I can look squarely back at him.

Harper Lee

#36. She was almost in love with him. No, that's impossible, she thought: either you are or you aren't. Love's the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it's a you-do or you-don't proposition with them all.

Harper Lee

#37. Her world was at its best when her time came to leave it.

Harper Lee

#38. He's freed himself from every stigma, but he sits nursing his hangover of hatred ... .

Harper Lee

#39. Perspicacious individual I've met in years, you are

Harper Lee

#40. Conservative resistance to change, that's all,

Harper Lee

#41. Alexandra had been married for thirty-three years; if it had made any impression on her one way or another, she never showed it.

Harper Lee

#42. Well, your father and I decided it was time I came to stay with you for a while." "For a while" in Maycomb meant anything from three days to thirty years. Jem and I exchanged glances. "Jem's

Harper Lee

#43. the Times is so wrapped up in its duty to posterity it bores you to death.

Harper Lee

#44. Jem, see if you can stand in Bob Ewell's shoes a minute. I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does.

Harper Lee

#45. Dill was in hearty agreement with this plan of action. Dill was becoming something of a trail anyways, following Jem about ... He only grew closer to Jem. (Lee 55)

Harper Lee

#46. Of course he shouldn't, but he'll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?

Harper Lee

#47. But in the secret's courts of man's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.

Harper Lee

#48. Atticus sometimes said that one way to tell whether a witness was lying or telling the truth was to listen rather than watch.

Harper Lee

#49. Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

Harper Lee

#50. Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]

Harper Lee

#51. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.

Harper Lee

#52. A world she despised, could not comprehend, nor defend herself against. a world that did not want her

Harper Lee

#53. Shoulder up, I reeled around to face Boo Radley and his bloody fangs; instead, I saw Dill ringing the bell with all his might in Atticus's face.

Harper Lee

#54. 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.

Harper Lee

#55. She wondered why she had never thought her country beautiful.

Harper Lee

#56. People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.

Harper Lee

#57. The same families married the same families until relationships were hopelessly entangled and the members of the community looked monotonously alike.

Harper Lee

#58. Angel-bright, life-in-death; get off the road, don't suck my breath.

Harper Lee

#59. Well, as a general rule, most women, before they've got 'em, present to their men smiling, agreeing faces. They hide their thoughts. You now, when you're feeling hateful, honey, you are hateful.

Harper Lee

#60. 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.

Harper Lee

#61. The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower, she thought.

Harper Lee

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

Harper Lee

#63. As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don't think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, 'I'm probably no better than you, but I'm certainly your equal.

Harper Lee

#64. But Cal," Jem protested, "you don't look even near as old as Atticus."
"Colored folks don't show their ages so fast," she said.

Harper Lee

#65. Seven o'clock and all's well," said Atticus. "You've been swearing at your aunt." "I have not." "She told me you had." "I was crude, but I didn't cuss her.

Harper Lee

#66. That Tom had a good chance of going free, or at least of having a new trial.

Harper Lee

#67. We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.

Harper Lee

#68. 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.

Harper Lee

#69. The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics.

Harper Lee

#70. Multiplied - the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to begin with - in some cases they became horrifyingly more.

Harper Lee

#71. Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.

Harper Lee

#72. Jem was twelve. He was difficult to live with, inconsistent, moody. His appetite was appalling, and he told me so many times to stop pestering him I consulted Atticus: "Reckon he's got tapeworm" Atticus said no, Jem was growing. I must be patient with him and disturb him as little as possible.

Harper Lee

#73. My book had a universal theme. It's not a "racial" novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.

Harper Lee

#74. Blind, that's what I am. I never opened my eyes. I never thought to look into people's hearts, I looked only in their faces.

Harper Lee

#75. There was no mistaking it, Albert had stuck out his tongue at her. She was pregnant. Jean

Harper Lee

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

Harper Lee

#77. But I never figured out how Atticus knew I was listening, and it was not until many years later that I realized he wanted me to hear every word he said.

Harper Lee

#78. Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn't the way they actually are.

Harper Lee

#79. I do wish this time you'd try to dress better while you're home. Folks in town get the wrong impression of you. They think you are
ah
slumming.

Harper Lee

#80. From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

Harper Lee

#81. They fought to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity. Dr.

Harper Lee

#82. Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South's political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.

Harper Lee

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

Harper Lee

#84. That's what I thought, too when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?

Harper Lee

#85. He staked me out, marked as his property, said I was the only girl he would ever love, then he neglected me. I beat him up twice but it did no good, he only grew closer to Jem.

Harper Lee

#86. Mr. Clinton," he had said, when Henry ventured to inquire about a particularly ambiguous examination, "you may write until doomsday for all I care, but if your answers do not coincide with my answers they are wrong. Wrong, sir.

Harper Lee

#87. My memory stirred.

Harper Lee

#88. yard where the trees were, where the carhouse was, and

Harper Lee

#89. She wondered how she would behave when her time came to hurt day in and day out. Hardly like Atticus: if you asked him how he was feeling he would tell you, but he never complained; his disposition remained the same, so in order to find out how he was feeling, you had to ask him.

Harper Lee

#90. You see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that's the way I want to live.

Harper Lee

#91. Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another) ... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.

Harper Lee

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

Harper Lee

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

Harper Lee

#94. No jury in this part of the world's going to say, "We think you're guilty, but not very," on a charge like that. It was either straight acquittal or nothing.

Harper Lee

#95. That's the one thing about here, the South, you've missed. You'd be amazed if you knew how many people are on your side, if side's the right word. You're no special case. The woods are full of people like you, but we need some more of you. She

Harper Lee

#96. The apple does not fall far from the tree.

Harper Lee

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

Harper Lee

#98. Atticus
" ... said Jem bleakly. "How could they do it, how could they?"
"I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before & they did it tonight & they'll do it again & when they do it
seems that only children weep.

Harper Lee

#99. You're no better. You're no damn better. You just try to kill their souls instead of their bodies.

Harper Lee

#100. People have a habit of doing everyday things even under the oddest conditions.

Harper Lee