Quotes from Harper Lee

I think I'll be a clown when I get grown,' said Dill. Jem and I stopped in our tracks. 'Yes sir, a clown,' he said. 'There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.' 'You got it backwards, Dill,' said Jem. 'Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them.

There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one.

Jean Louise grinned. Her father said it took at least five years to learn law after one left law school: one practiced economy for two years, learned Alabama Pleading for two more, reread the Bible and Shakespeare for the fifth. Then one was fully equipped to hold on under any conditions.

Every man's island, Jean Louise, every man's watchman, is his conscience.

If Dill were here he would leap over the fence to her, bring her head down to his, kiss her, and hold her hand, and together they would take their stand when there was trouble in the house. But Dill had long since gone from her.

You know the truth, and the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women--black or white. 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.

It was Miss Stephanie's pleasure to tell us: this morning Mr. Bob Ewell stopped Atticus on the post office corner, spat in his face, and told him he'd get him if it took the rest of his life.

Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them.

I interrupted to make Uncle Jack let me know when he would pull it out, but he held up a bloody splinter in a pair of tweezers and said he yanked it while I was laughing, that was what was known as relativity.

S? fii curajos înseamn? s? ÅŸtii c? eÅŸti pierdut înainte de a întreprinde ceva.

I fall in love everyday, with ideas and sensations, people I see. I hold them long enough to let them go, but I keep them in my heart and in my soul.

Miss Maudie settled her bridgework. "You know old Mr. Radley was a foot-washing Baptist—" "That's what you are, ain't it?" "My shell's not that hard, child. I'm just a Baptist." "Don't you all believe in foot-washing?" "We do. At home in the bathtub." "But we can't have communion with you all—

No war was ever fought for so many different reasons.

sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father." I

The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they can't scare us with the essential inferiority line, they'll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that's the only thing they know is feared in our fundamentalist hearts down here.

Aver coraggio significa sapere di essere sconfitti prima ancora di cominciare, e cominciare egualmente e arrivare sino in fondo, qualsiasi cosa succeda.

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

Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?" Dill's maleness was beginning to assert itself. "Cry about the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people, too." "Atticus

There was no finer young man, said the people of Maycomb, than Henry Clinton. Jean Louise agreed.

Voglio insegnarti un semplice trucco, Scout, e se lo imparerai andrai molto più d'accordo con tutti: se vuoi capire una persona, devi cercare di considerare le cose dal suo punto di vista..."[...] "Se vuoi capire una persona, devi provare a are a metterti nei suoi panni e riflettere un poco.

Don't worry, though, he'll be as good as new. Boys his age bounce.

if we followed our feelings all the time we'd be like cats chasin' their tails.

His name's Arthur and he's alive.

Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.