Pulitzer Prize Winners

"Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

"Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy."

"The most valuable thing I inherited was a temperament that does not revolt against Necessity and that is constantly renewed in Hope."

"I am not interested in the ephemeral — such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions."

"Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties."

"Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday."

"Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value."

"Many plays — certainly mine — are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them."

"I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island."

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes."

"I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility."

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."

"I crossed a threshold of reader pride after finishing “To Kill a Mockingbird.”"

"She's like a national treasure. She's someone who has made a difference … with this book. The book is still as strong as it ever was, and so is the film. All the kids in the United States read this book and see the film in the seventh and eighth grades and write papers and essays. My husband used to get thousands and thousands of letters from teachers who would send them to him."

"I remember the lasting impression that Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird had on me. I read that book again every decade or so."

"When the new wore off his grandfather’s watch, and carrying it became a day’s burdensome task, Jem no longer felt the necessity of ascertaining the hour every five minutes."

"There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire."

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird."

"...reasonable men, they went because we were there. There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried."

"Mount Everest: throughout my early life, she was cold and there."

"...he said if enough people—a stadium full, maybe—were to concentrate on one thing, such as setting a tree afire in the woods, that the tree would ignite of its own accord. I toyed with the idea of asking everyone below to concentrate on setting Tom Robinson free, but"

"Each child was supposed to clip an item from a newspaper, absorb its contents, and reveal them to the class. This practice allegedly overcame a variety of evils: standing in front of his fellows encouraged good posture and gave a child poise; delivering a short talk made him word-conscious; learning his current event strengthened his memory; being singled out made him more than ever anxious to return to the Group."

"...brown but backwards"

"Well, they’re Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn’t dream of interrupting you at golf."

"...before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself."

"Atticus said that Jem was trying hard to forget something, but what he was really doing was storing it away for a while, until enough time passed. Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out. When he was able to think about it, Jem would be himself again."

"Well if you don’t want me to grow up talkin‘ that way, why do you send me to school?"

"That’s because you can’t hold something in your mind but a little while, said Jem. It’s different with grown folks, we—"

"From now on it’ll be everybody less one—"

"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."

"An' they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things... Atticus, he was real nice..." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

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

"I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill. "Yes, sir, a clown.... 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." "You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem. "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them." "Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks."

"But 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 a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal."

"The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. 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, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."

"I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system — that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up."

"Slowly but surely I began to see the pattern of questions: from questions that Mr.Gilmer did not deem sufficiently irrelevant or immaterial to object to, Atticus was quietly building up before the jury the picture of the Ewell's home life."

"Apparently, Mayella's recital had given her confidence, but it was not her father's brash kind: there was something stealthy about hers, like a steady-eyed cat with a twitchy tail."

"“There has been a request,” Judge Taylor said, “that this courtroom be cleared of spectators, or at least of women and children, a request that will be denied for the time being. People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for, and they have the right to subject their children to it, but I can assure you of one thing: you will receive what you see and hear in silence or you will leave this courtroom, but you won’t leave it until the whole boiling of you come before me on contempt charges. Mr. Ewell, you will keep your testimony within the confines of Christian English usage, if that is possible. Proceed, Mr. Gilmer.”"

"So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something — that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children."

"Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in."

"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."

"Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ‘em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language."

"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 see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

"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."

"It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived."

"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience."

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