Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
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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A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.
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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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The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
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I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.
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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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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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Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
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Ladies in bunches always filled me with vague apprehension and a firm desire to be elsewhere.
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You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
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She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.
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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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Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.
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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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Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
HARPER LEE