Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
Courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.
People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.
As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever 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, he is trash.
Pass the damn ham, please.
We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself. It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.
Things are always better in the morning.
As a reader I loathe introductions. Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.
Summer, and he watches his children’s heart break. Autumn again and Boo’s children needed him. 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.
There is one way in this country in which all men are created equal – there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is the court.
Things are never as bad as they seem.
I don’t want to hear any words like that while I’m here. Scout, you’ll get in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You want to grow up to be a lady, don’t you?? I said not particularly.
I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it – seems that only children weep.
So maybe I’ll spend some years in prison, but you’ll have a big head start on me in hell!
The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.
Cry about the simple hell people give other people- without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people too.
Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.