Top 500 Harper Lee Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Jem, naturally, was Boo: he went under the front steps and shrieked and howled from time to time.”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

353. “In all his life, Jem had never declined a dare. I suppose he loved honor more than his head.”

— Harper Lee

354. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another they are Communists.”

— Harper Lee

355. “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

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

— Harper Lee

357. “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

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

360. “They said later that Mrs. Merriweather was putting her all into the grand finale, that she had crooned, “Po-ork,” with a confidence born of pine trees and butterbeans entering on cue. She waited a few seconds, then called, “Po-ork?” When nothing materialized, she yelled, “Pork!”

— Harper Lee

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Harper Lee

366. “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

367. “We could do nothing to please her. If I said as sunnily as I could, ‘Hey, Mrs Dubose,’ I would receive for an answer, ‘Don’t you say hey to me, you ugly girl! You say good afternoon, Mrs Dubose!”

— Harper Lee

368. “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

369. “Dill was a villain’s villain: he could get into any character part assigned him, and appear tall if height was part of the devilry required.”

— Harper Lee

370. “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

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

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

373. “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

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

— Harper Lee

375. “Do you really think so?”

— Harper Lee

376. “Men in this age have turned the Other Woman into a psychiatrist’s couch, and at far less expense, too.”

— Harper Lee

377. “Atticus said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr. Cunningham displayed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.”

— Harper Lee

378. “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

379. “His name’s Arthur and he’s alive.”

— Harper Lee

380. “Bootleggers caused enough trouble in the Quarters, but women were worse. Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.”

— Harper Lee

381. “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

382. “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

383. “Good God, girl!” shouted her uncle. “It was an army of individuals! They walked off their farms and walked to the War!”

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

385. “Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment.”

— Harper Lee

386. “There’s one thing I truly believe, Gertrude,” she continued, “but some people just don’t see it my way. If we just let them know we forgive ’em, that we’ve forgotten it, then this whole thing’ll blow over.”

— Harper Lee

387. “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

388. “Before she dozed off, it occurred to her that for the first time in her life Calpurnia had said “Yes ma’am” and “Miss Scout” to her, forms of address usually reserved for the presence of high company.”

— Harper Lee

389. “I felt the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me, and for the second time in my life I thought of running away.”

— Harper Lee

390. “In spite of herself, Jean Louise grinned. Alexandra could be relied upon to produce a malapropism on occasions, the most notable being her comment on the gulosity displayed by the youngest member of a Mobile Jewish family upon completing his thirteenth year: Alexandra declared that Aaron Stein was the greediest boy she had ever seen, that he ate fourteen ears of corn at his Menopause.”

— Harper Lee

391. “Stephanie Crawford even told me once she woke up in the middle of the night and found him looking in the window at her. I said what did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him? That shut her up for a while.”

— Harper Lee

392. “People’s attitudes toward the duties of a government have changed. The have-nots have risen and have demanded and received their due – sometimes more than their due. The haves are restricted from getting more. You are protected from the winter winds of old age, not by yourself voluntarily, but by a government that says we do not trust you to provide for yourself, therefore we will make you save.”

— Harper Lee

393. “Let’s go home, Scout. It’s been a long day. Open the door for me.”

— Harper Lee

394. “He had asked me earlier in the summer to marry him, then he promptly forgot about it. He staked me out, marked as his property, said I was the only girl he would ever love, then he neglected me. I beat him up twice but it did no good, he only grew closer to Jem.”

— Harper Lee

395. “You won’t find better people than in New York.”

— Harper Lee

396. “They’re people, aren’t they? We were quite willing to import them when they made money for us.”

— Harper Lee

397. “Never, never, never, on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don’t already know the answer to.”

— Harper Lee

398. “They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions,’ said Atticus, ‘but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.’ When.”

— Harper Lee

399. “Well, he can make somebody’s will so airtight can’t anybody meddle with it.”

— Harper Lee

400. “But in the absence of eye-witness there’s always a doubt, sometimes only the shadow of a doubt. The law says ‘reasonable doubt’, but I think a defendant’s entitled to the shadow of doubt. There’s always the possibility, no matter how improbable, that he’s innocent.”

— Harper Lee