Well, they're Southern people, and if they know you are working
at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But
they wouldn't dream of interrupting you at golf.
Harper Lee
On why she has done her best creative thinking
while playing golf, quoted in Time 1961 after she received the
Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird. |
I am still alive although very quiet.
Harper Lee
Writing in 1995 introduction to 35th anniversary
edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. |
When you have a hit like that, you can't go anywhere but down.
Harper Lee
Asked by cousin Richard Williams why she
never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird. |
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when
I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red
slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the
square. 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.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Scout
(Jean Louise Finch) the narrator, Chapter 1. |
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One
does not love breathing.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Scout,
Chapter 2. |
You never really understand a person until you consider things
from his point of view--until you climb inside of his skin and
walk around in it.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Atticus
Finch to daughter Scout, Chapter 3. |
You are too young to understand it ... but sometimes the
Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle
in the hand of--oh, of your father.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Miss
Maudie Atkinson to Scout, Chapter 5. |
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,
and you can look down the street and see the results.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Miss Maudie
Atkinson, Chapter 5. |
The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he
went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me - he tried
to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him
and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He
declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't
see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished
more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper
and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if
they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd
have the facts.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Scout,
Chapter 7. |
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.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Atticus
Finch, Chapter 9. |
I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Scout,
Chapter 9. |
Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving
a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Atticus
Finch, Chapter 9. |
Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember
it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Attitus
Finch to daughter Scout, Chapter 10. |
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.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Miss Maudie
Atkinson to Scout, Chapter 10. |
It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated
guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who
ever lived.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Scout,
Chapter 11. |
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's
conscience.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Attitus
Finch, Chapter 11. |
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.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Attitus
Finch, Chapter 11. |
She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen,
and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved
in being a girl.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Scout,
Chapter 12. |
So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses....
That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can
be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we
need a police force of children.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Attitus
Finch, Chapter 16. |
The witnesses for the state have presented themselves to you
gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their
testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen
would go along with them on the assumption - the evil assumption
- that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral
beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our
women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber.
Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom
Robinson's skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You
know the truth, the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes
are immoral, some Negro men cannot be trusted around women,
black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human
race and to no particular race of men.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, Speech to the jury
by Atticus Finch, Chapter 20. |
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. 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.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, Speech to the jury
by Atticus Finch, Chapter 20. |
"I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said
Dill. "Yes, sir, a clown.... 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."
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 22. |
I don't know [how they could convict Tom Robinson], but they
did it. 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.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Attitus
Finch to son Jem Finch, Chapter 22. |
I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Scout,
Chapter 23. |
The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in
a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have
a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. 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.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Atticus
Finch to his son Jem Finch, Chapter 23. |
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 beginning to understand
why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time.
It's because he wants to stay inside.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Jem Finch,
Chapter 23. |
I'm not a very good man, sir, but I am sheriff of Maycomb
County. Lived in this town all my life an' I'm goin' on forty-three
years old. Know everything that's happened here since before
I was born. There's a black boy dead for no reason, and the
man responsible for it's dead. Let the dead bury the dead this
time, Mr. Finch. Let the dead bury the dead.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Sheriff
Tate, Chapter 30. |
Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness
and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave
us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck
pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never
put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given
him nothing, and it made me sad.
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Scout,
Chapter 31. |
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