Quotes from Harper Lee

What good are wings without the courage to fly

Everybody did; most of the first grade had failed it last year.

To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron fisted. It's sitting down and doing it, whether you think you have it in you or not. Every day.

If you had been on that jury, son, and eleven other boys like you, Tom would have been a free man... (Lee 251)

If I hear a consonant I look around.

Let the dead bury the dead, this time.

He merely reared his children as best he could, and in terms of the affection his children felt for him, he best was indeed good: he was never too tired to play Keep-Away; he was never too busy to invent marvelous stories; he was never too absorbed in his own problems to listen earnestly to a tale of woe; every neight he read aloud to them until his voice cracked.

The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest.

Love her, but leave her wild

The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think .

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? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beggining to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all the time. . . it's because he wants to stay inside.

If I didn't have to stay I'd leave.

My text for today is taken from the twenty-first chapter of Isaiah, verse six: For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

I wanted you to see something about her–I 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. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.

That ain't honest, Mr. Raymond, making yourself out badder'n you are already-- It ain't honest but it's mighty helpful to folks

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.

Mockingbirds don't do one thing but . . . sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

If your father's anything, he's civilized in his heart. Marksmanship's a gift of God, a talent--oh, you have to practice to make it perfect, but shootin's different from playing the piano or the like. I think maybe he put his gun down when he realized that God had given him an unfair advantage over most living things. I guess he decided he wouldn't shoot till he had to, and he had to today.

confident that you gentlemen will go along with them on the assumption-the evil assumption-that all negro men are not to be trusted, all negro men are basically immoral beings, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber which we know it is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin.

There are no chic people in Texas.

We live in weird times and they are in Brooklyn.

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

The only things that she cares about are a comfortable chair, a good reading light, and enough books and magazines.

It's not okay to hate anybody