Quote

It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike--in the second place, folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do.

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
Tell
Place
Knowin
Around
Ladylike
Like
Mockingbird
Folks
Necessary
Second
Somebody

More quotes by Harper Lee

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Don't you study about other folks's business till you take care of your own.
Harper Lee
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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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Summer, and he watches his children's heart break. Autumn again and Boo's children needed him. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.
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...but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.
Harper Lee
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Talking to Francis gave me the sensation of settling slowly to the bottom of the ocean.
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You can pet him, Mr. Arthur. He's asleep.
Harper Lee
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We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.
Harper Lee
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Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies.
Harper Lee
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They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night.
Harper Lee
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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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There is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is the court.
Harper Lee
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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.
Harper Lee
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Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.
Harper Lee
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I think I'll be a clown when I get grown.... There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.
Harper Lee
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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.
Harper Lee
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Southern lawyers don't read novels much.
Harper Lee
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I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.
Harper Lee
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We’re so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we’ve got men like Atticus to go for us.
Harper Lee
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I try to give'em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason.
Harper Lee
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Serving on a jury forces a man to make up his mind and declare himself about something. Men don't like to do that. Sometimes it's unpleasant.
Harper Lee