Top 500 Harper Lee Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “But a man who has lived by truth – and you have believed in what he has lived – he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing. I think that is why I’m nearly out of my mind.”

— Harper Lee

203. “Integrity, humor, and patience were the three words for Atticus Finch.”

— Harper Lee

204. “My father is one of the few men I’ve known who has genuine humility, and it lends him a natural dignity. He has absolutely no ego drive, and so he is one of the most beloved men in this part of the state.”

— Harper Lee

205. “Summer, and he watched his children’s heart break.”

— Harper Lee

206. “Sometimes we have to kill a little so we can live.”

— Harper Lee

207. “I don’t hafta take his sass.”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

209. “I ain’t cynical, Miss Alexandra. Tellin’ the truth’s not cynical, is it?” “The way you tell it, it is.”

— Harper Lee

210. “Summer was our best season – everything good to eat, a thousand colors in a parched landscape.”

— Harper Lee

211. “I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m something else and I don’t know what. Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me – these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.”

— Harper Lee

212. “Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her.”

— Harper Lee

213. “Mutual defiance made them alike.”

— Harper Lee

214. “My book had a universal theme. It’s not a “racial” novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.”

— Harper Lee

215. “The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.”

— Harper Lee

216. “What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out.”

— Harper Lee

217. “Of course Jem antagonized me sometimes until I could kill him, but when it came down to it he was all I had.”

— Harper Lee

218. “You got it backwards, Dill,’ said Jem. ‘Clowns are sad, it’s folks that laugh at them.”

— Harper Lee

219. “The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, “He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman,” had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.”

— Harper Lee

220. “There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads – they couldn’t be fair if they tried.”

— Harper Lee

221. “I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me. You cheated me, you’ve driven me out of my home and now I’m in a no-man’s-land but good – there’s no place for me any more in Maycomb, and I’ll never be entirely at home anywhere else.” Her.”

— Harper Lee

222. “She was almost in love with him. No, that’s impossible, she thought: either you are or you aren’t. Love’s the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it’s a you-do or you-don’t proposition with them all.”

— Harper Lee

223. “Had I ever harbored the mystical notions about mountains that seem to obsess lawyers and judges, Aunt Alexandra would have been analogous to Mount Everest: throughout my early life, she was cold and there.”

— Harper Lee

224. “One time I asked her to have a chew and she said no thanks, that – chewing gum cleaved to her palate and rendered her speechless,” said Jem carefully. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

— Harper Lee

225. “Adevaratul curaj este sa stii caesti invins de la bun inceput, dar sa nu renunti totusi la lupta.”

— Harper Lee

226. “I heard ‘Equal rights for all; special privileges for none,’ and to me it didn’t mean anything but what it said.”

— Harper Lee

227. “Te digan lo que te digan, no permitas que te hagan perder los nervios. Procura luchar con el cerebro, para variar...”

— Harper Lee

228. “I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth. We were both born here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder what you saw and heard.”

— Harper Lee

229. “Atticus said to Jem one day, “I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. “Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, 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

230. “The dark tower. Childe Roland to the dark tower came.”

— Harper Lee

231. “As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings – I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like all of us.”

— Harper Lee

232. “Don’t matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house’s yo’ comp’ny, and don’t you let me catch you remarkin’ on their ways like you was so high and and mighty! Yo’ folks might be better’n the Cunninghams but it don’t count for nothin’ the way you’re disgracin’ ’em.”

— Harper Lee

233. “When Atticus came home to dinner he found me crouched down aiming across the street. “What are you shooting at?” “Miss Maudie’s rear end.” Atticus turned and saw my generous target bending over her bushes. He pushed his hat to the back of his head and crossed the street. “Maudie,” he called, “I thought I’d better warn you. You’re in considerable peril.”

— Harper Lee

234. “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.”

— Harper Lee

235. “We are making a step. It’s just a baby step but it’s a step.”

— Harper Lee

236. “Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not wanted. We have secrets.”

— Harper Lee

237. “Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.”

— Harper Lee

238. “It ain’t time to worry yet. I’ll let you know when.”

— Harper Lee

239. “You folks might be better than the Cunninghams, but it doesn’t count for nothing the way you’re disgracing them.”

— Harper Lee

240. “Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience.”

— Harper Lee

241. “I guess when you’re hurt your first instinct’s to hurt back.”

— Harper Lee

242. “Colonel Maycomb’s misplaced self-confidence and slender sense of direction brought disaster to all who rode with him in the Creek Indian Wars.”

— Harper Lee

243. “Matches were dangerous, but cards were fatal.”

— Harper Lee

244. “I am their blood and bones, I have dug in this ground, this is my home. But I am not their blood, the ground doesn’t care who digs it, I am a stranger at a cocktail party.”

— Harper Lee

245. “When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it.”

— Harper Lee

246. “Scout Finch, juvenile desperado, hellraiser extraordinary.”

— Harper Lee

247. “I was proceeding on the dim theory, aside from the innate attractiveness of such words, that if Atticus discovered I had picked them up at school he wouldn’t make me go.”

— Harper Lee

248. “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. 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

249. “Cry about the simple hell people give other people – without even thinking.”

— Harper Lee

250. “I fall in love everyday, with ideas and sensations, people I see. I hold them long enough to let them go, but I keep them in my heart and in my soul.”

— Harper Lee