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Quotes from To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee

1926–2016 United States

← All quotes by Harper Lee

37 quotes

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

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

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.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

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

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

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

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.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it, hotheadedness isn't.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ‘em.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

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.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

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.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

In the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

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.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

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.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

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.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Harper Lee (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.