As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, ‘I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.
HARPER LEESometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.
More Harper Lee Quotes
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Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
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Sometimes the Bible in the hands of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hands of another.
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Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.
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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.
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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.
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There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.
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My objectives are very limited. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse.
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Ladies in bunches always filled me with vague apprehension and a firm desire to be elsewhere.
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Writing is something you’ll never learn in any university or at any school. It’s something that is within you, and if it isn’t there, nothing can put it there.
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But before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.
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You rarely win, but sometimes you do.
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With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.
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Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
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I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you’re working at home they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn’t dream of interrupting on the golf course.
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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.
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I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.
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Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.
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The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.
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I do my best to love everybody.
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Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.
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You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
HARPER LEE