Quotes by Harper Lee

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

“Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions.”

“There are just some kind of men whore so busy worrying about the next world theyve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

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

“I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the diff...”

“They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn't make them subhuman.You are telling them Jesus loves them, but not much.”

“I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church--was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read...”

“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landsca...”

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

“There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.”

“...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.”

“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 livi...”

“But before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.”

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

“I willed myself to stay awake, but the rain was so soft and the room was so warm and his voice was so deep and his knee was so snug that I slept.”

“Every man's island, Jean Louise, every man's watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscience.”

“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.”

“Whether Maycomb knows it or not, we're paying the highest tribute we can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.''Who?' Aunt Alexandra never knew she was echoing her twelve-year-old ...”

“I think there might be a better way,change the law”

“You confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a mans heart, and a mans failings Ill grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes em like all ...”