If he’s not, he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets—

— Harper Lee

If we followed our feelings all the time we'd be like cats chain´ their tails.

— Harper Lee

If we followed our feelings all the time, we'd be like cats chasin' their tails.

— Harper Lee

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

— Harper Lee

I just know Maycomb. I'm not in the least sensitive about it, but good Lord, I'm certainly aware of it.

— Harper Lee

I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days.

— Harper Lee

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.

— Harper Lee

I mean this: every time I come home, I feel like I'm coming back to the world, and when I leave Macomb it's like leaving the world.

— Harper Lee

I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says, but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference.

— Harper Lee

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.

— Harper Lee