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.
HARPER LEEWhen 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.
More Harper Lee Quotes
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Things are always better in the morning.
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I do my best to love everybody.
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Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they’re quite different from people who must write.
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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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But sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down.
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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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The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
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Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
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With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.
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You rarely win, but sometimes you do.
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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 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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Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
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But before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.
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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.
HARPER LEE