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I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.

Harper Lee

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Harper Lee
Age: 89 †
Born: 1926
Born: April 28
Died: 2016
Died: February 19
Musician
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Monroeville
Alabama
Nelle Harper Lee
Committed
Merely
Rigid
Crime
Gentlemen
Broken
Honored
Society
Motivated
Time
Gentleman
Code
Guilt

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Let the dead bury the dead.
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People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
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There are just some kind of men…who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one.
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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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Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.
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Ladies pick funny things to be proud of.
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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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I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.
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They're ugly, but those are the facts of life.
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I didn't know how you were going to do it, but from now on I'll never worry about what'll become of you, son, you'll always have an idea.
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Next morning I awoke, looked out the window and nearly died of fright. My screams brought Atticus from his bathroom half-shaven. The world's endin', Atticus! Please do something -! I dragged him to the window and pointed. No it's not, he said. It's snowing.
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She's an old lady and she's ill. You just hold your head high and be a gentleman. Whatever she says to you, it's your job not to let her make you mad.
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No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
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I'm Charles Baker Harris...I can read
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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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When stalking one’s prey, it is best to take one’s time. Say nothing, and as sure as eggs he will become curious and emerge.
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The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics.
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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.
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Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces.
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Naturally, you don't sit down in white hot inspiration and write with a burning flame in front of you. But since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer, and Mockingbird put itself together for me so accommodatingly, I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.
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