Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Turtles don't feel, stupid," said Jem. "Were you ever a turtle, huh?
People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
...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.
You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.
Don't you study about other folks's business till you take care of your own.
Atticus, he was real nice." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.
I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.
Atticus said naming people after Confederate generals made slow steady drinkers.
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
Long ago, in a burst of friendliness, Aunty and Uncle Jimmy produced a son named Henry.
Talking to Francis gave me the sensation of settling slowly to the bottom of the ocean.
I just thought you'd like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin' I can do it.
You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.
That boy is your company. And if he wants to eat up that tablecloth, you let him, you hear?
Ladies in bunches always filled me with vague apprehension and a firm desire to be elsewhere.
Try fighting with your head for a change... it's a good one, even if it does resist learning.
...in other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama Interview - March 1964
Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward.
I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.
We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.
Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a Klan... The Ku Klux's gone... It'll never come back.
From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.
One must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.
Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.
Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
Sometimes the Bible in the hands of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another.
I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.
Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
We’re so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we’ve got men like Atticus to go for us.
Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.
That proves something- that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.
You see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that's the way I want to live.
When a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains.
There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them.
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.
Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve tried to live so I can look squarely back at him.
But sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down.
Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.
The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets -
There's a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible.
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.
They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night.
Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?
Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.
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.