Harper Lee

"We are all products of our time and place, yet we can still choose our path."

"The complexity of human nature is both what makes us flawed and beautiful."

"In writing, as in life, honesty is the only policy worth pursuing."

"To be fully alive means to feel deeply, both joy and pain."

"The stories we tell about ourselves shape who we become."

"A writer must be willing to be vulnerable, to expose their own fears and doubts."

"The act of listening is often more powerful than the act of speaking."

"We teach best by example, not by lecture or demand."

"The past cannot be changed, but how we respond to it can transform our future."

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."

"Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win."

"Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it."

"The presence of justice is about the only real thing that matters in this world."

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

"Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through."

"Some Negroes lie, some are immoral, some Negro men are not be trusted around women—the truth, I suppose, is the same for any race."

"It's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you."

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand."

"The simple hell of it is, we have just enough ability to want to see eye to eye, but not enough to do it."

"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."

"People in their right minds never take pride in their talents."

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."

"I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks."

"The Lord never intended for us to pay the way we do."

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy."

"As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, that white man is trash."

"I wanted to put some of the spirit of what Atticus did into a book."

"Idealism is a wonderful thing. It just gets in the way of the truth."

"We're the same folks, only the difference is some of us are blind and some of us see."