Quotes from Harper Lee

I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.

We said good-bye, and Dill went inside the house. He evidently remembered he was engaged to me, for he ran back out and kissed me swiftly in front of Jem. Yawl write, hear? he bawled after us.

Keberanian adalah saat kau tahu akan kalah sebelum memulai, tetapi kau tetap memulai dan merampungkannya, apa pun yang terjadi

That proves something- that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.

You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but do one thing for me if you will: you just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat.Try fighting with your head for a change . . .it's a good one, even if it does resist learning.

You damn morphodite, I'll kill you!

How could they do it, how could they?' 'I don't know, but they did it.They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do - seems that only children weep

Jem, I ain't ever heard of a nigger snowman, I said.

The only thing I'm afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn't be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won't be that way much longer.

When they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things . . . Atticus, he was real nice. . . ." His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.

Atticus said, "I can take anything anybody calls me so long as it's not true.

She wondered why she had never thought her country beautiful.

I can tell you. In New York you are your own person. You may reach out and embrace all of Manhattan in sweet aloneness, or you can go to hell if you want to.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends." "That's odd, isn't it?

You're color blind, Jean Louise," he said. "You always have been, you always will be. The only differences you see between one human and another are differences in looks and intelligence and character and the like. You've never been prodded to look at people as a race, and now that race is the burning issue of the day, you're still unable to think racially. You see only people.

Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

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.

Where are your pants, son?

On any other day she would have stood barefoot on the wet grass listening to the mockingbirds' early service; she would have pondered over the meaninglessness of silent, austere beauty renewing itself with every sunrise and going ungazed at by half the world. She would have walked beneath yellow-ringed pines rising to a brilliant eastern sky, and her senses would have succumbed to the joy of the morning. It was waiting to receive her, but she neither looked nor listened.

The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, "He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman," had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.

Jen and I were accustomed to our father's last-will-and-testament diction, and were at times free to interrupt Atticus for a translation when it was beyond our understanding.

Mutual defiance made them alike.

Were you so scared that she'd hurt you, you ran, a big buck like you? No suh, I's scared I'd be in court, just like I am now. Scared of arrest, scared you'd have to face up to what you did? No suh, scared I'd hafta face up to what I didn't do.

Atticus said that Jem was trying hard to forget something, but what he was really doing was storing it away for a while, until enough time passed. Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out. When he was able to think about it, Jem would be himself again.