Top 500 Harper Lee Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I could think of nothing else to say to her. In fact I could never think of anything to say to her, and I sat thinking of past painful conversations between us: How are you, Jean Louise? Fine, thank you ma’am, how are you? Very well, thank you; what have you been doing with yourself? Nothin’. Don’t you do anything? Nome. Certainly you have friends? Yessum. Well what do you all do? Nothin’.”

— Harper Lee

252. “Don’t push her. Let her go at her own speed. Push her and every mule in the county’d be easier to live with.”

— Harper Lee

253. “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 difference.”

— Harper Lee

254. “You can pet him, Mr. Arthur. He’s asleep...”

— Harper Lee

255. “I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants.”

— Harper Lee

256. “Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up – some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.”

— Harper Lee

257. “Persecution comes from people who are prejudiced.”

— Harper Lee

258. “The Lord never sends you more than you can bear –.”

— Harper Lee

259. “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. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.”

— Harper Lee

260. “Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present? 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

261. “People have a habit of doing everyday things even under the oddest conditions.”

— Harper Lee

262. “She was easy to look at and easy to be with most of the time, but she was in no sense of the word an easy person. She was afflicted with a restlessness of spirit he could not guess at, but he knew she was the one for him.”

— Harper Lee

263. “Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.”

— Harper Lee

264. “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 difference. I need a watchman to go forth and proclaim to them all that twenty-six years is too long to play a joke on anybody, no matter how funny it is.”

— Harper Lee

265. “When you live in New York, you often have the feeling that New York’s not the world. I mean this: every time I come home, I feel like I’m coming back to the world, and when I leave Maycomb it’s like leaving the world.”

— Harper Lee

266. “She heard her father’s voice, a tiny voice talking in the warm comfortable past. Gentlemen, if there’s one slogan in this world I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”

— Harper Lee

267. “If a man says to you, “This is the truth,” and you believe him, and you discover what he says is not the truth, you are disappointed and you make sure you will not be caught by him again. But a man who has lived the 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.”

— Harper Lee

268. “We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Mauide would yell back, “Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they’ll hear you the post office, I haven’t heard you yet!” Jem and I thought this a strange way to ask for a lady’s hand in marriage, but then again Uncle Jack was rather strange.”

— Harper Lee

269. “You’re color blind, Jean Louise,” he said. “You always have been, you always will be. The only differences you see between one human and another are differences in looks and intelligence and character and the like. You’ve never been prodded to look at people as a race, and now that race is the burning issue of the day, you’re still unable to think racially. You see only people.”

— Harper Lee

270. “Boo and I walked up the steps to the porch. His fingers found the doorknob. He gently released my hand, opened the door, enter inside, and shut the door behind him. I never saw him again.”

— Harper Lee

271. “So maybe I’ll spend some years in prison, but you’ll have a big head start on me in hell!”

— Harper Lee

272. “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

273. “In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”

— Harper Lee

274. “Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present?”

— Harper Lee

275. “I’d be churched to death, bridge-partied to death, called upon to give book reviews at the Amanuensis Club, expected to become a part of the community. It takes a lot of what I don’t have to be a member of this wedding.”

— Harper Lee

276. “They fought to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity.”

— Harper Lee

277. “I thought women liked to be thought strange and mysterious.” “No, they just like to look strange and mysterious. 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.”

— Harper Lee

278. “Time spent indoors was time wasted.”

— Harper Lee

279. “Autumn was her happiest season.”

— Harper Lee

280. “Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? 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

281. “We wondered, sometimes, when your conscience and his would part company, and over what.” Dr. Finch smiled. “Well, we know now. I’m just thankful I was around when the ructions started. Atticus couldn’t talk to you the way I’m talking – ” “Why not, sir?” “You wouldn’t have listened to him. You couldn’t have listened. Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level.”

— Harper Lee

282. “Have you ever been snubbed, Atticus? Do you know how it feels? No, don’t tell me they’re children and don’t feel it: I was a child and felt it, so grown children must feel, too. A real good snub, Atticus, makes you feel like you’re too nasty to associate with people. How they’re as good as they are now is a mystery to me, after a hundred years of systematic denial that they’re human. I wonder what kind of miracle we could work with a week’s decency.”

— Harper Lee

283. “Clowns are sad, it’s folks that laugh at them.”

— Harper Lee

284. “Well, coming out of the courthouse that night Miss Gates was-she goin’ down the steps in front of us, you musta not seen her- she was talking with Miss Stephen Crawford. I heard her say it’s time somebody taught ‘em a lesson, they were gettin’ way above themselves, an’ the next thing they think they can do is marry us. Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an’ then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home-.”

— Harper Lee

285. “I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

— Harper Lee

286. “Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m something else and I don’t know what.”

— Harper Lee

287. “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 living in.”

— Harper Lee

288. “Isn’t it about time you got over that? Bury your dead, Jean Louise.”

— Harper Lee

289. “She answered: please believe me, what has happened in my family is not what you think. I can say only this – that everything I learned about human decency I learned here. I learned nothing from you except how to be suspicious. I didn’t know what hate was until I lived among you and saw you hating every day. They even had to pass laws to keep you from hating.”

— Harper Lee

290. “Herbert Jemson was Methodist of the whole cloth: he was notoriously short on theology and a mile long on good works.”

— Harper Lee

291. “It seems quixotic today, with jet airplanes and overdoses of Nembutal, that a man would go through a war for something so insignificant as his state.”

— Harper Lee

292. “No votee, no eatee.”

— Harper Lee

293. “Its 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

294. “It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing, keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess. When she was calm enough to listen, she considered that a cruel practical joke had been played upon her: she must now go into a world of femininity, a world she despised, could not comprehend nor defend herself against, a world that did not want her.”

— Harper Lee

295. “If you did not want much, there was plenty.”

— Harper Lee

296. “She stepped aside to let him pass. She followed him to the car and watched him get laboriously into the front seat. As she welcomed him silently to the human race, the stab of discovery made her tremble a little. Somebody walked over my grave, she thought, probably Jem on some idiotic errand.”

— Harper Lee

297. “The easy way out of this would be to marry Hank and let him labor for her. After a few years, when the children were waist-high, the man would come along whom she should have married in the first place. There would be searchings of hearts, fevers and frets, long looks at each other on the post office steps, and misery for everybody.”

— Harper Lee

298. “We generally get the juries we deserve.”

— Harper Lee

299. “Jem,” I asked, “what’s a mixed child?” “Half white, half colored. You’ve seen ’em, Scout. You know that red-kinky-headed one that delivers for the drugstore. He’s half white. They’re real sad.” “Sad, how come?” “They don’t belong anywhere. Colored folks won’t have ’em because they’re half white; white folks won’t have ’em ’cause they’re colored, so they’re just in-betweens, don’t belong anywhere.”

— Harper Lee

300. “My objectives are very limited. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse.”

— Harper Lee