Harper Lee
Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go and nothing to buy... and no money to buy it with.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Education
Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.Collection: Good Luck
Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings.Collection: Battle
...in other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama Interview - March 1964Collection: Alabama
This time we aren't fighting the Yankees, we're fighting our friends. But remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they're still our friends and this is still our home.Collection: Home
Long ago, in a burst of friendliness, Aunty and Uncle Jimmy produced a son named Henry.Collection: Uncles
Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'.Collection: Father
Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Thinking
He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.Collection: Morning
I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn't realized it (the original book) had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Men
Things are never as bad as they seem.Collection: 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.Collection: Children
To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron fisted. It's sitting down and doing it whether you think you have it in you or not. Everyday. Alone. Without interruption. Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour to writing. In fact, it's heartbreak most of the time.Collection: Writing
I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.Collection: Book
Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write.Collection: Writing
People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.Collection: Powerful
There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.Collection: Beautiful
Wordsworth was right when he said that we trail clouds of glory as we come into the world, that we are born with a divine sense of perception. As we grow older, the world closes in on us, and we gradually lose the freshness of viewpoint that we had as children. That is why I think children should get to know this country while they are young.Collection: Country
We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Hurt
She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.Collection: Desire
Ladies pick funny things to be proud of.Collection: Funny Things
With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.Collection: Tkam
You rarely win, but sometimes you do.Collection: Winning
summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed 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.Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Silly
She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.Collection: Girl
Naturally, you don't sit down in "white hot inspiration" and write with a burning flame in front of you. But since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer, and Mockingbird put itself together for me so accommodatingly, I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.Collection: Inspiration
Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.Collection: Tkam
Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.Collection: Book
...but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.Collection: Integrity
Southern lawyers don't read novels much.Collection: Southern
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.Collection: Children
I don't hafta take his sassCollection: Sass
I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.Collection: Said
Havin' a gun around's an invitation to somebody to shoot you.Collection: Gun
Whatever she says to you, it’s your job not to let her make you mad.Collection: Jobs
As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.Collection: Home
One must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.Collection: Lying
Let the dead bury the dead.Collection: Tkam
Mutual defiance made them alike.Collection: Made
Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.Collection: Book
Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.Collection: Church
I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.Collection: Giving
I had never thought about it, but summer was Dill by the fishpool smoking string, Dill's eyes alive with complicated plans to make Boo Radley emerge; summer was the swiftness with which Dill would reach up and kiss me when Jem was not looking, the longings we sometimes felt each other feel. With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable..." - Scout FinchCollection: Summer