Harper Lee Quotes

Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.

I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system — that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.

I'm Charles Baker Harris...I can read

Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.

"Next morning I awoke, looked out the window and nearly died of fright. My screams brought Atticus from his bathroom half-shaven.
"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.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Finders were keepers unless title was proven.

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, an evasion simply muddles 'em.

The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.

Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.

You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.