Harper Lee

I had never encountered a being who deliberately perpetuated fraud against himself.

The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they can't scare us with the essential inferiority line, they'll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that's the only thing they know is feared in our fundamentalist hearts down here.

You confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man__ heart, and a man__ failings _ I__l grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes __m like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.

I think there might be a better way,change the law

I willed myself to stay awake, but the rain was so soft and the room was so warm and his voice was so deep and his knee was so snug that I slept.

...but before I can live with other folks, I've got to live with myself.The one thing that doesn't abide by mojority rule is a person's conscience.

...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.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.

I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church--was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words. But I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

You deny them hope... You are telling them that Jesus loves them, but not much.

As Kipling said, that__ another story...

Don't matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house's yo' comp'ny, and don't you let me catch you remarkin' on their ways like you was so high and and mighty! Yo' folks might be better'n the Cunninghams but it don't count for nothin' the way you're disgracin' 'em.

We can't always have our druthers.

As you grow older, you__l see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don__ you forget it__henever 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

...summer was the swiftness with which Dill would reach up and kiss me when Jem was not looking, the longing we sometimes felt each other feel. With him life was routine; without him life was unbearable.

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.

Things are always better in the morning.

I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days. You don't have it yet, but you have a shadow of the beginnings of it. You haven't the humbleness of mind-" "I thought the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom.""It's the same thing. Humility.