“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“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.
- Atticus Finch”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... 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.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Atticus, he was real nice."
"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“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, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“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, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“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 faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year.
Scout”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“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.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Things are always better in the morning.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“There are just some kind of men who-who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
“It's not time to worry yet”
― Harper Lee, quote from To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Born place: in Monroeville, Alabama, The United States
Born date April 28, 1926
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“Al's voice was faint but resolute. "Stand up. Try to look sexy."
"In a bedsheet?" I complained, running my hands down it. "How can I look sexy in a bedsheet?" He cleared his throat, and I grimaced. "Never mind.”
― Kim Harrison, quote from Ever After
“My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.”
― William Maxwell, quote from So Long, See You Tomorrow
“Dear Anyone: This is a letter from one anyone to another anyone, no names required, because nobody really knows anyway. Names don't make a hell of a lot of difference. The world is made up entirely of strangers. Millions and millions of them. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Sometimes we think we know other people, especially those we supposedly are close to, but if we really knew them, why are we so often surprised by the shit they do? Like, parents are always surprised by what their kids will do. They raise them from the time they are babies, spend each and every day with them, think they're these goddamn fucking angels, and then one day the cops come to the door and say hey, guess what parents? Your kid just bashed some other kid's head in with a baseball bat. Or you're the kid, and you think things are pretty fucking OK, and then one day this guy who's supposed to be your dad says so long, have a nice life. And you think, what the fuck is this? So years later, your mom ends up living with another guy, and he seems OK, but you think, when's it coming? That's what life is. Life is always asking yourself, when's it coming? Because if it hasn't come for a long time, you know you're fucking due. All the best, Anyone.”
― Linwood Barclay, quote from No Time for Goodbye
“No, really, Herr Nietzche, I have great admiration for you. Sympathy. You want to make us able to live with the void. Not lie ourselves into good-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling human considerations, but to question as has never been questioned before, relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil, through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. The most absolute, the most piercing questions. Rejecting mankind as it is, that ordinary, practical, thieving, stinking, unilluminated, sodden rabble, not only the laboring rabble, but even worse the "educated" rabble with its books and concerts and lectures, its liberalism and its romantic theatrical "loves" and "passions"--it all deserves to die, it will die. Okay. Still, your extremists must survive. No survival, no Amor Fati. Your immoralists also eat meat. They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers. Humankind lives mainly upon perverted ideas. Perverted, your ideas are no better than those the Christianity you condemn. Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption. I send you greetings from this mere border of grassy temporal light, and wish you happiness, wherever you are. Yours, under the veil of Maya, M.E.H.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Herzog
“Even in the most wretched life, there’s hope.”
― Michelle Moran, quote from Cleopatra's Daughter
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The Best ManBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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