Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

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For the life of me, I did not understand how he[Atticus] could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic.

Harper Lee
We said good-bye, and Dill went inside the house. He evidently remembered he was engaged to me, for he ran back out and kissed me swiftly in front of Jem. "Yawl write, hear?" he bawled after us.

Harper Lee
There are just some kind of men... who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one.

Harper Lee
I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work.

Harper Lee
"An' they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things... Atticus, he was real nice..."
"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

Harper Lee
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.

Harper Lee
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

Harper Lee
I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that's why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.

Harper Lee
Judge Taylor was on the bench, looking like a sleepy old shark, his pilot fish writing rapidly below in front of him.

Harper Lee
When stalking one's prey, it is best to take one's time. Say nothing, and as sure as eggs he will become curious and emerge.

Harper Lee
I could think of nothing else to say to her. In fact I could never think of anything to say to her, and I sat thinking of past painful conversations between us: How are you, Jean Louise? Fine, thank you ma'am, how are you? Very well, thank you; what have you been doing with yourself? Nothin'. Don't you do anything? Nome. Certainly you have friends? Yessum. Well what do you all do? Nothin'.

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

Harper Lee
Scout, I'm telling you for the last time, shut your trap or go home - I declare to the Lord you're gettin' more like a girl every day! With that, I had no option but to join them.

Harper Lee
Try fighting with your head for a change... it's a good one, even if it does resist learning.

Harper Lee
It's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you.

Harper Lee
With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.

Harper Lee
I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.

Harper Lee
Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves.

Harper Lee
You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat. Try fightin' with your head for a change. -Atticus Finch

Harper Lee
One must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.

Harper Lee
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
They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it — seems that only the children weep. Good night.

Harper Lee
I don't want to hear any words like that while I'm here. Scout, you'll get in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You want to grow up to be a lady, don't you?' I said not particularly.

Harper Lee
I shall never marry, Atticus." "Why?" "I might have children.

Harper Lee
Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

Harper Lee
See there?" Jem was scowling triumphantly. "Nothin' to it. I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl its mortifyin

Harper Lee
That boy is your company. And if he wants to eat up that tablecloth, you let him, you hear?

Harper Lee
There's just some kind of men you have to shoot before you can say hidy to 'em. Even then, they ain't worth the bullet it takes to shoot 'em.

Harper Lee
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
Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.

Harper Lee