Top 500 Harper Lee Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “It’s just that I’m so afraid of making a mess of being married to the wrong man – the wrong kind for me, I mean. I’m no different from any other woman, and the wrong man would turn me into a screamin’ shrew in record time.”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

304. “You are fascinated with yourself. You will say anything that occurs to you, but what I can’t understand are the things that do occur to you. 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.”

— Harper Lee

305. “I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days.”

— Harper Lee

306. “Southern lawyers don’t read novels much.”

— Harper Lee

307. “Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level.”

— Harper Lee

308. “But the white supremacists fear reason, because they know cold reason beats them. Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

— Harper Lee

309. “Madam, my father has left me flopping like a flounder at low tide and you say what’s the matter.”

— Harper Lee

310. “It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made bearable.”

— Harper Lee

311. “Sherlock Holmes and Jem Finch would agree.”

— Harper Lee

312. “You’d better take time for ’em, honey, otherwise you’ll never grow. You’ll be the same at sixty as you are now – then you’ll be a case and not my niece. You have a tendency not to give anybody elbow room in your mind for their ideas, no matter how silly you think they are.”

— Harper Lee

313. “Uncle Jack, I can’t live in a place that I don’t agree with and that doesn’t agree with me.”

— Harper Lee

314. “I think I’ll be a clown when I get grown,’ said Dill. Jem and I stopped in our tracks. ‘Yes sir, a clown,’ he said. ‘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.”

— Harper Lee

315. “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. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won’t be that way much longer.”

— Harper Lee

316. “I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

— Harper Lee

317. “We Finches don’t marry the children of rednecked white trash.”

— Harper Lee

318. “Her uncle could annoy the hell out of her when he chose, apparently he was choosing to do so now, and she resented it. “Nothing.” He sat down, took off his glasses, and returned them to his vest pocket. He spoke deliberately. “Baby,” he said, “all over the South your father and men like your father are fighting a sort of rearguard, delaying action to preserve a certain kind of philosophy that’s almost gone down the drain –.”

— Harper Lee

319. “Ladies seemed to live in faint horror of men, seemed unwilling to approve wholeheartedly of them. But I liked them. There was something about them, no matter how much they cussed and drank and gambled and chewed; no matter how undelectable they were, there was something about them that I instinctively liked.”

— Harper Lee

320. “Hay hombres tan ocupados en acongojarse por el otro mundo que no han aprendido a vivir en este.”

— Harper Lee

321. “If Dill were here he would leap over the fence to her, bring her head down to his, kiss her, and hold her hand, and together they would take their stand when there was trouble in the house. But Dill had long since gone from her.”

— Harper Lee

322. “As I sit here and breathe, I never thought the good God would let me live to see someone walk into the middle of a revolution, pull a lugubrious face, and say, ‘What’s the matter?”

— Harper Lee

323. “She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way.”

— Harper Lee

324. “I don’t know if I can tell you, honey. 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. It’s silly. I can’t explain it, and what makes it sillier is that I’d go stark raving living in Maycomb.”

— Harper Lee

325. “The only way in which all men in America are equal, is in the courtroom – Atticus.”

— Harper Lee

326. “Atticus said, “I can take anything anybody calls me so long as it’s not true.”

— Harper Lee

327. “I’m only trying to make you see beyond men’s acts to their motives. A man can appear to be a part of something not-so-good on its face, but don’t take it upon yourself to judge him unless you know his motives as well. A man can be boiling inside, but he knows a mild answer works better than showing his rage. A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.”

— Harper Lee

328. “All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess.”

— Harper Lee

329. “Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions.”

— Harper Lee

330. “Baby, you’ll have to grow some more before this makes sense to you, but your daddy and your mamma loved each other something fierce, and when you love somebody like that, Miss Scout, why that’s what you want to do. That’s what everybody wants to do when they love like that. They want to get married, they want to kiss and hug and carry on and have babies all the time.”

— Harper Lee

331. “Her world was at its best when her time came to leave it.”

— Harper Lee

332. “Cal had told her all girls had it, it was natural as breathing, it was a sign they were growing up, and they had it until they were in their fifties. At the time, Jean Louise was so overcome with despair at the prospect of being too old to enjoy anything when it would finally be over, she refrained from pursuing the subject.”

— Harper Lee

333. “Jem, naturally, was Boo: he went under the front steps and shrieked and howled from time to time.”

— Harper Lee

334. “What Boo Rdley did might seem peculiar to us but it did not seem peculiar to him.”

— Harper Lee

335. “I said I would like it very much, which was a lie, but one must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can’t do anything about them.”

— Harper Lee

336. “Atticus killed several birds with one stone when he read to his children, and would probably have caused a child psychologist considerable dismay: he read to Jem and Jean Louise whatever he happened to be reading, and the children grew up possessed of an obscure erudition. They cut their back teeth on military history, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, True Detective Mysteries, The Code of Alabama, the Bible, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.”

— Harper Lee

337. “The one thing she liked most about Henry Clinton was that he let her be silent when she wanted to be. She did not have to entertain him.”

— Harper Lee

338. “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

339. “Havin’ a gun around’s an invitation to somebody to shoot you.”

— Harper Lee

340. “You’re no better. You’re no damn better. You just try to kill their souls instead of their bodies.”

— Harper Lee

341. “They have manners, Claudine. They’re just different from ours. The person who pushed me on the bus expected to be pushed back. That’s what I was supposed to do; it’s just a game. You won’t find better people than in New York.”

— Harper Lee

342. “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?”

— Harper Lee

343. “I’m only trying to make you see beyond men’s acts to their motives.”

— Harper Lee

344. “Jean Louise,” he said dryly, “not much more than five per cent of the South’s population ever saw a slave, much less owned one. Now, something must have irritated the other ninety-five per cent.” Jean Louise looked blankly at her uncle. “Has it never occurred to you – have you never, somewhere along the line, received vibrations to the effect – that this territory was a separate nation? No matter what its political bonds, a nation with its own people, existing within a nation?”

— Harper Lee

345. “If this thing’s hushed up it’ll be a simple denial to Jem of the way I’ve tried to raise him. 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... if I connived at something like this, frankly I couldn’t meet his eye, and the day I can’t do that I’ll know I’ve lost him. I don’t want to lose him and Scout, because they’re all I’ve got.”

— Harper Lee

346. “Henry,” she said primly, “I’ll have an affair with you but I won’t marry you.”

— Harper Lee

347. “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.”

— Harper Lee

348. “What Mr. Radley did was his own business. If he wanted to come out, he would. If he wanted to stay inside his own house he had the right to stay inside free from the attentions of inquisitive children, which was a mild term for the likes of us.”

— Harper Lee

349. “I can tell you. In New York you are your own person. You may reach out and embrace all of Manhattan in sweet aloneness, or you can go to hell if you want to.”

— Harper Lee

350. “No I’m not. It might benefit you to go back and have a look at what some of our founding fathers really believed, instead of relying so much on what people these days tell you they believed.”

— Harper Lee