Top 500 Harper Lee Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Herbert Jemson was Methodist of the whole cloth: he was notoriously short on theology and a mile long on good works.”

— Harper Lee

302. “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

303. “No votee, no eatee.”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Harper Lee

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “I can’t beat you, I can’t join you.”

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

— Harper Lee

314. “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

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

— Harper Lee

316. “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

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

— Harper Lee

318. “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

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

— Harper Lee

320. “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

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

— Harper Lee

322. “You can’t do that, Scout,” Atticus said. “Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases. In your case, the law remains rigid. So to school you must go.”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Harper Lee

327. “Uno es valiente cuando, sabiendo que ha perdido ya antes de empezar, empieza a pesar de todo y sigue hasta el final, pase lo que pase.”

— Harper Lee

328. “As Kipling said, that’s another story...”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Harper Lee

335. “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

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

— Harper Lee

337. “Atticus Finch’s a deep reader, a mighty deep reader.”

— Harper Lee

338. “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

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

— Harper Lee

340. “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

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

— Harper Lee

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Harper Lee

345. “Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets.”

— Harper Lee

346. “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

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

349. “The world’s endin’, Atticus! Please do something – !” I dragged him to the window and pointed. “No it’s not,” he said. “It’s snowing.”

— Harper Lee

350. “That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages.”

— Harper Lee