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 LEEBut before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.
More Harper Lee Quotes
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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.
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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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But before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.
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As a reader I loathe introductions…Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.
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The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
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Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.
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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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Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.
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You can’t really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.
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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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Things are never as bad as they seem.
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Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
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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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People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
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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.
HARPER LEE