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Harper Lee Quotes
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Nelle Harper Lee , better known by her pen name Harper Lee, was an American novelist widely known for To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960. Immediately successful, it won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Though Lee had only published this single book, in 2007 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contribution to literature. Additionally, Lee received numerous honorary degrees, though she declined to speak on those occasions. She was also known for assisting her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood . Capote was the basis for the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. The novel was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

Another novel, Go Set a Watchman, was written in the mid-1950s and published in July 2015 as a "sequel", though it was later confirmed to be To Kill a Mockingbird's first draft.

✵ 28. April 1926 – 19. February 2016
Harper Lee photo
Harper Lee: 142 quotes25 likes

Harper Lee Quotes

“I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“I can't beat you, I can't join you.”

Harper Lee book Go Set a Watchman

Source: Go Set a Watchman

“That proves something- that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“You damn morphodite, I'll kill you!”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird

“It's better to be silent than to be a fool.”

Harper Lee

Harper Lee quote: “Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”

“Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike- in the second place, folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

“Your name's longer'n you are.”

Harper Lee

“…reasonable men, they went because we were there. There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses…. That proves something — that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 2, ch. 16
Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me — he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 7
Jean Louise (Scout) Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 9
Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“Well if you don’t want me to grow up talkin‘ that way, why do you send me to school?”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“From now on it’ll be everybody less one”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“Well, they’re Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn’t dream of interrupting you at golf.”

Harper Lee

On why she has done her best creative thinking while playing golf, as quoted in Time (12 May 1980)

“When the new wore off his grandfather’s watch, and carrying it became a day’s burdensome task, Jem no longer felt the necessity of ascertaining the hour every five minutes.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“Apparently, Mayella's recital had given her confidence, but it was not her father's brash kind: there was something stealthy about hers, like a steady-eyed cat with a twitchy tail.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 2, ch. 18
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“…he said if enough people—a stadium full, maybe—were to concentrate on one thing, such as setting a tree afire in the woods, that the tree would ignite of its own accord. I toyed with the idea of asking everyone below to concentrate on setting Tom Robinson free, but”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“Each child was supposed to clip an item from a newspaper, absorb its contents, and reveal them to the class. This practice allegedly overcame a variety of evils: standing in front of his fellows encouraged good posture and gave a child poise; delivering a short talk made him word-conscious; learning his current event strengthened his memory; being singled out made him more than ever anxious to return to the Group.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal — there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J. P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 2, ch. 20
Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“Slowly but surely I began to see the pattern of questions: from questions that Mr. Gilmer did not deem sufficiently irrelevant or immaterial to object to, Atticus was quietly building up before the jury the picture of the Ewell's home life.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 2, ch. 18
Jean Louise (Scout) Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“And it's certainly bad, but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. I don't know of any landowner around here who begrudges those children any game their father can hit. Of course he shouldn't, but he'll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch.3
Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 4
Jean Louise (Scout) Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“That’s because you can’t hold something in your mind but a little while, said Jem. It’s different with grown folks, we”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Epigraph, quoting Charles Lamb
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)