Harper Lee — Quotes from Author's Books

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.

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

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.

"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.”
“Well I’m gonna be a new kind of clown. I’m gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks."

It’s not okay to hate anybody.

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.
So don’t let Mrs. Dubose get you down.
She has enough troubles of her own.

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.

“Atticus, he was real nice..." <...>
"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

... Jack!
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, and evasion simply muddles ‘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.

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.
They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.
That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

People have a habit of doing everyday things even under the oddest conditions.

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.

There was no point in saying you were sorry if you aren’t.

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, an answer that might wreck your case.

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