Quotes from Harper Lee

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]

Why doesn't their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I'm not. I'm something else and I don't know what.

I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.

One must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.

Courage is when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.

But a man who has lived by truth—and you have believed in what he has lived—he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing. I think that is why I'm nearly out of my mind.

No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.

In Maycomb, if one went for a walk with no definite purpose in mind, it was correct to believe one's mind incapable of definite purpose.

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.

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

Don't push her. Let her go at her own speed. Push her and every mule in the county'd be easier to live with.

They're ugly, but those are the facts of life.

I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody...

I'm Charles Baker Harris...I can read

Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another.

You are fascinated with yourself. You will say anything that occurs to you, but what I can't understand are the things that do occur to you. I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth.

Finders were keepers unless title was proven.

I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that's why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.

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.

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.

Sometimes it's better to bend the law a little in special cases.

In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama

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

What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn't give. He stays rigid. Doesn't even try to listen, just lashes out.