Top 500 Harper Lee Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Writing is simply something you must do. It’s rather like virtue in that it is its own reward.”

— Harper Lee

52. “Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.”

— Harper Lee

53. “Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.”

— Harper Lee

54. “She did not stand alone, but what stood behind her, the most potent moral force in her life, was the love of her father.”

— Harper Lee

55. “Atticus said naming people after Confederate generals made slow steady drinkers.”

— Harper Lee

56. “Kalau hanya ada satu jenis manusia, mengapa mereka tidak bisa rukun? Kalau mereka semua sama, mengapa mereka merepotkan diri untuk saling membenci?”

— Harper Lee

57. “The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets -.”

— Harper Lee

58. “Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.”

— Harper Lee

59. “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.”

— Harper Lee

60. “Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand.”

— Harper Lee

61. “I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year. Scout.”

— Harper Lee

62. “Summer, and he watches his children’s heart break. Autumn again and Boo’s children needed him. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”

— Harper Lee

63. “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 faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em.”

— Harper Lee

64. “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

65. “She was one of the rare ones, so effortlessly herself, and the world loved her for it.”

— Harper Lee

66. “Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.”

— Harper Lee

67. “Cecil Jacobs is a big wet hen!”

— Harper Lee

68. “Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.”

— Harper Lee

69. “I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work.”

— Harper Lee

70. “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.”

— Harper Lee

71. “They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again and when they do it – seems that only the children weep. Good night.”

— Harper Lee

72. “Cry about the simple hell people give other people- without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people too.”

— Harper Lee

73. “Don’t you study about other folks’s business till you take care of your own.”

— Harper Lee

74. “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.”

— Harper Lee

75. “In Maycomb, if one went for a walk with no definite purpose in mind, it was correct to believe one’s mind incapable of definite purpose.”

— Harper Lee

76. “There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”

— Harper Lee

77. “Ladies in bunches always filled me with vague apprehension and a firm desire to be elsewhere.”

— Harper Lee

78. “You never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.”

— Harper Lee

79. “I came to the conclusion that people were just peculiar, I withdrew from them, and never thought about them until I was forced to.”

— Harper Lee

80. “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.”

— Harper Lee

81. “That boy is your company. And if he wants to eat up that tablecloth, you let him, you hear?”

— Harper Lee

82. “Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. She was even lonelier than Boo Radley, who had not been out of the house in twenty-five years.”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

84. “Uno es valiente cuando, sabiendo que la batalla esta perdida de antemano, lo intenta a pesar de todo y lucha hasta el final.”

— Harper Lee

85. “They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life.”

— Harper Lee

86. “Little Chuck grinned broadly. “There ain’t no need to fear a cootie, ma’am. Ain’t you ever seen one? Now don’t you be afraid, you just go back to your desk and teach us some more.”

— Harper Lee

87. “Dill if you don’t hush I’ll knock you bowlegged.”

— Harper Lee

88. “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.”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

90. “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.”

— Harper Lee

91. “Atticus, are we going to win it?” “No, honey.” “Then, why – ” “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,” Atticus said.”

— Harper Lee

92. “But before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

— Harper Lee

93. “Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women – black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

— Harper Lee

94. “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.”

— Harper Lee

95. “I try to give’em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.”

— Harper Lee

96. “I’m little but I’m old.”

— Harper Lee

97. “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.”

— Harper Lee

98. “By the time I’m ready to get married I’ll be ninety and then it’ll be too late.”

— Harper Lee

99. “Most people are nice when you finally see them.”

— Harper Lee

100. “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.”

— Harper Lee