Top 500 Harper Lee Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies – Scout.”

— Harper Lee

153. “Love whom you will but marry your own kind.”

— Harper Lee

154. “If we followed our feelings all the time, we’d be like cats chasin’ their tails.”

— Harper Lee

155. “But I never figured out how Atticus knew I was listening, and it was not until many years later that I realized he wanted me to hear every word he said.”

— Harper Lee

156. “Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.”

— Harper Lee

157. “Lightning rods guarding some graves denoted dead who rested uneasily; stumps of burned-out candles stood at the heads of infant graves. It was a happy cemetery.”

— Harper Lee

158. “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.”

— Harper Lee

159. “He said I was the only girl he would ever love, then he neglected me. I beat him up, but it did no good.”

— Harper Lee

160. “Sometimes I think I’m a total failure as a parent, but I’m all they’ve got. Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him.”

— Harper Lee

161. “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 am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty.” Atticus’s.”

— Harper Lee

162. “Ladies pick funny things to be proud of.”

— Harper Lee

163. “One could be a ray of sunshine in pants as well. -Scout Finch.”

— Harper Lee

164. “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”

— Harper Lee

165. “I had a feeling that I shouldn’t be here listening to this sinful man who had mixed children and didn’t care who knew it, but he was fascinating. I had never encountered a being who deliberately perpetrated fraud against himself. But why had he entrusted us with his deepest secret? I asked him why. ‘Because you’re children and you can unterstand it,’ he said.”

— Harper Lee

166. “There’s some folks who don’t eat like us,” she whispered fiercely, “but you ain’t called on to contradict ‘em at the table when they don’t. That boy’s yo’ comp’ny and if he wants to eat up the table cloth you let him, you hear?”

— Harper Lee

167. “We’re so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we’ve got men like Atticus to go for us.”

— Harper Lee

168. “Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him.”

— Harper Lee

169. “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between.”

— Harper Lee

170. “Hey, Boo,” I said.”

— Harper Lee

171. “He’s the same in the court-room as he is on the public streets.”

— Harper Lee

172. “She’s an old lady and she’s ill. You just hold your head high and be a gentleman. Whatever she says to you, it’s your job not to let her make you mad.”

— Harper Lee

173. “He did not do the things our schoolmates’ fathers did: he never went hunting, he did not play poker or fish or drink or smoke. He sat in the livingroom and read.”

— Harper Lee

174. “My Lord, Aunt Stephanie, you almost gave me a heart attack!”

— Harper Lee

175. “And don’t you fret yourself about anything – why, if we followed our feelings all the time we’d be like cats chasin’ their tails.”

— Harper Lee

176. “No war was ever fought for so many different reasons.”

— Harper Lee

177. “You’ve really got to start hitting the books because it’s no joke out here.”

— Harper Lee

178. “Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.”

— Harper Lee

179. “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.”

— Harper Lee

180. “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.”

— Harper Lee

181. “I proved him a liar but John made him look like a fool. All the time Ewell was on the stand I couldn’t dare look at John and keep a straight face. John looked at him as if he were a three-legged chicken or a square egg. Don’t tell me judges don’t try to prejudice juries.”

— Harper Lee

182. “They said if he’d had two good arms he’d have made it, he was moving that fast. Seventeen bullet holes in him. They didn’t have to shoot him that much.”

— Harper Lee

183. “Aunty,” she said, cordially, “why don’t you go pee in your hat?”

— Harper Lee

184. “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

185. “I interrupted to make Uncle Jack let me know when he would pull it out, but he held up a bloody splinter in a pair of tweezers and said he yanked it while I was laughing, that was what was known as relativity.”

— Harper Lee

186. “Of course he shouldn’t, but he’ll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?”

— Harper Lee

187. “You deny them hope. Any man in this world, Atticus, any man who has a head and arms and legs, was born with hope in his heart. You won’t find that in the Constitution, I picked that up in church somewhere. They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.”

— Harper Lee

188. “Autumn was her happiest season. There was an expectancy about its sounds and shapes:.”

— Harper Lee

189. “It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not ladylike – in the second place, folks don’t like to have someone around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates them. Your not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.”

— Harper Lee

190. “What would Atticus do?” passed through her unconscious; she never realized what made her dig in her feet and stand firm whenever she did was her father; that whatever was decent and of good report in her character was put there by her father; she did not know that she worshiped him.”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

192. “His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”

— Harper Lee

193. “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 landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.”

— Harper Lee

194. “She printed DEMOCRACY in large letters. ‘Democracy,’ she said. ‘Does anybody have a definition?’ ‘Us,’ somebody said. I raised my hand, remembering an old campaign slogan Atticus had once told me about. ‘What do you think it means, Jean Louise?’ ‘“Equal rights for all, special privileges for none!”,’ I quoted.”

— Harper Lee

195. “It seems to me, that love could be labeled poison and we’d drink it anyways.”

— Harper Lee

196. “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. 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. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”

— Harper Lee

197. “When you get past all the boa feathers, every woman born in this world wants a strong man who knows her like a book, who’s not only her lover but he who keepeth Israel. Stupid, isn’t it?”

— Harper Lee

198. “She was born in the Objective case.”

— Harper Lee

199. “Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.”

— Harper Lee

200. “I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re nose-heavy, too much of them and we’re tail-heavy – it’s a matter of balance.”

— Harper Lee