Welcome to our collection of quotes by Harper Lee. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016) was an American novelist best known for her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Lee has received numerous accolades and honorary degrees, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 which was awarded for her contribution to literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Capote was the basis for the character Dill Harris in To Kill a Mockingbird.
The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936 when she was 10. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. It was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. She also wrote the novel Go Set a Watchman in the mid-1950s and published it in July 2015 as a sequel to Mockingbird, but it was later confirmed to be her first draft of Mockingbird.
The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.
In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I'm concerned, that part is Greg's for life. I've had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I've always refused.
I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.
So many writers don't like to write... I like to write, and sometimes I'm afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don't want to leave it. And as a result, I'll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.
Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of another.
You see, more than a simple matter of putting down words, writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write.
A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.
As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it -- whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.
My father is one of the few men I've known who has genuine humility, and it lends him a natural dignity. He has absolutely no ego drive, and so he is one of the most beloved men in this part of the state.
I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.
When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, an evasion simply muddles 'em.
It's quite a thing, if you've never been in or known a small southern town. The people are not particularly sophisticated, naturally. They're not worldly wise in any way. But they tell you a story whenever they see you.
It's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you.
Folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do. It aggravates 'em.
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view -- until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
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.
It was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.
We're so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we've got men like Atticus to go for us.
Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings.
Walter looked as if he had been raised on fish food: his eyes, as blue as Dill Harris's, were red-rimmed and watery.
I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.
Serving on a jury forces a man to make up his mind and declare himself about something. Men don't like to do that. Sometimes it's unpleasant.
Then Mr. Underwood's meaning became clear: Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case.
As a reader I loathe introductions...Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.
When she looked thus, only God and Robert Browning knew what she was likely to say.
She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.
But before I can live with other folks, I've got to live with myself.The one thing that doesn't abide by mojority rule is a person's conscience.
Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
My daddy had a pocket watch that he wore at all times in court. I gave Greg the watch and showed him how Daddy used to use it.
There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads--they couldn't be fair if they tried.
When stalking one's prey, it is best to take one's time. Say nothing, and as sure as eggs he will become curious and emerge.
So far nothing in your life has interfered with your reasoning process.
All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbours was that, if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white.
They had never been able to sustain fifteen minutes' conversation with one another without advancing irreconcilable points of view, invigorating in friendships, but in close blood relations producing only uneasy cordiality.
Rose Aylmer was Uncle Jack's cat. She was a beautiful yellow female Uncle Jack said was one of the few women he could stand permanently.
Long ago, in a burst of friendliness, Aunty and Uncle Jimmy produced a son named Henry.
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.
The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets .
It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike- in the second place, folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do.
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.
I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you're working at home they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn't dream of interrupting on the golf course.
My objectives are very limited. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse.
I just thought you'd like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin' I can do it.
Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up -- some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.
Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.
Jem, naturally, was Boo: he went under the front steps and shrieked and howled from time to time.
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
See there? Jem was scowling triumphantly. Nothin' to it. I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl its mortifyin.
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.
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.
He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.
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.
I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.
About your writing with you left hand, are you ambidextrous, Mr. Ewell? I most positively am not, I can use one hand good as the other. One hand good as the other.
How could they do it, how could they?
I don't know, but they did. They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only children weep.
But in the absence of eye-witness there's always a doubt, sometimes only the shadow of a doubt. The law says 'reasonable doubt', but I think a defendant's entitled to the shadow of doubt. There's always the possibility, no matter how improbable, that he's innocent.
Never, never, never on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to, was a tenet I absorbed with my baby food. Do it, and you'll often get an answer you don't want.
Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces.
You know, many writers really don't like to write. I think this the chief complaint of so many. They hate to write; they do it under the compulsion that makes any artist the victim he is, but they loathe the process of sitting down trying to turn thoughts into reasonable sentences.
There is one way in this country in which all men are created equal--there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is the court.
Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage.
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.
Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat;it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.
I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system -- that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality.
Ladies in bunches always filled me with vague apprehension and a firm desire to be elsewhere.
My book had a universal theme. It's not a racial novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.