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"You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here."
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"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."

"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."

"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."

"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."

"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."

"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
Explore more quotes by Harper Lee

"How could this be so, I wondered, as I read Mr. Underwood's editorial. Senseless killing--Tom had been given due process of law to the day of his death; he had been tried openly and convicted by twelve good men and true; my father had fought for him all the way. Then Mr. Underwood's meaning became clear: Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed."

"I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that's why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with."

"The white supremacists are really pretty smart. If they can't scare us with the essential inferiority line, they'll wrap it in a miasma of sex, because that's the only thing they know is feared in our fundamentalist hearts down here."

"People generally see what they look for and hear what they listen for, and they have a right to subject their children to it."

"I wanted you to see something about her-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. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew."

"I mean this: every time I come home, I feel like I'm coming back to the world, and when I leave Macomb it's like leaving the world."

"I do wish this time you'd try to dress better while you're home. Folks in town get the wrong impression of you. They think you are--ah--slumming."

"You confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man's heart, and a man's failings " I'll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes 'em like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers."
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