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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Harper Lee

305. “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

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

— Harper Lee

307. “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

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

315. “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

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

— Harper Lee

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Harper Lee

320. “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

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

— Harper Lee

322. “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

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

330. “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

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

333. “Alexandra was one of those people who had gone through life at no cost to themselves; had she been obliged to pay any emotional bills during her earthly life, Jean Louise could imagine her stopping at the check-in desk in heaven and demanding a refund.”

— Harper Lee

334. “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

335. “Good grief, baby, people don’t agree with the Klan, but they certainly don’t try to prevent them from puttin’ on sheets and making fools of themselves in public.”

— Harper Lee

336. “As she welcomed him silently to the human race, the stab of discovery made her tremble a little.”

— Harper Lee

337. “She wondered why she had never thought her country beautiful.”

— Harper Lee

338. “I’m no different from any other woman, and the wrong man would turn me into a screamin’ shrew in record time.”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Harper Lee

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “It’s grown people who always believe the worst.”

— Harper Lee

347. “The law is what he lives by. He’ll do his best to prevent someone from beating up somebody else, then he’ll turn around and try to stop no less than the Federal Government – just like you, child. You turned and tackled no less than your own tin god – but remember this, he’ll always do it by the letter and by the spirit of the law. That’s the way he lives.”

— Harper Lee

348. “Do you really think so?”

— Harper Lee

349. “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. He would protect her; he would marry her. “Tired of New York?” he said. “No.” “Give me a free hand for these two weeks and I’ll make you tired of it.” “Is that an improper suggestion?” “Yes.” “Go to hell, then.”

— Harper Lee

350. “Jefferson believed full citizenship was a privilege to be earned by each man, that it was not something given lightly nor to be taken lightly. A man couldn’t vote simply because he was a man, in Jefferson’s eyes. He had to be a responsible man. A vote was, to Jefferson, a precious privilege a man attained for himself in a – a live-and-let-live economy.”

— Harper Lee