Although she only published one novel during her lifetime ("Go Set a Watchman" doesn't count), today, Harper Lee remains one of the most, if not the most iconic author in the canon of American Literature. Publishing her timeless epic "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1960 and awarded The Pulitzer Prize a year later, Lee's masterpiece garnered rave recognition almost immediately after it made its way out of the publishing house and onto the shelves of bookstores before being seized off by the hands of eager readers like free ice cream at the local fair.
Praised as a Modern Day Classic, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is renowned for its exploration of racist and irrational attitudes in the Deep South, along heavier themes such as rape despite remaining warmly compassionate due to the deliverance of the story from a child's point-of-view, Lee's magnum opus remains widely taught and read in classrooms across North America, and is frequently referenced to incite debate concerning racial inequality and injustice. With the tenderest of any grace coupled with puncturing insight, here are 5 unforgettable quotes from Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, the one and only Harper Lee:
1. “People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
A quote that is probably more relevant now today than it was when Harper Lee first delivered it to her readers when "To Kill a Mockingbird" broke onto the literary scene. In a modern society dictated by people heavily immersed by their own opinions concerning various issues, Lee contends that the reason why such a problem has been allowed to linger and amplify is due individuals who only acknowledge facts that serve to affirm or justify their assumptions.
2. “The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
As an American Novelist, it is hardly a surprise, if not redundant, to find Harper Lee exploring the theme of conformity. Despite how 99.9% may believe the exhibition of a certain prejudice maybe as moral as the Bible, decency is decency. There is no quantifying it.
3. “Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
Along with examining racial prejudice, Harper Lee also interrogated another age-old bedrock of the culture in Deep South -- religion. Depicting throughout the story, how the latter was complimented by the former and vice-versa, Lee understood better than most with roots to the former Confederacy, that fanatic obsession with a certain set of beliefs was capable of getting one as drink as a forty of Jack Daniels. Not only sundering him/her from reality, but preventing, and causing him/her to live in it altogether.
4. "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."
With the measure of human dignity set as one of foundational themes of "To Kill a Mockingbird", Harper Lee believed that the true worth of a man rested not in his ability to wield a gun, be it a minor skirmish or a war, but in his ability to emerge from conflict all the more compassionate, all the more braver, and with a stronger affinity to forge a bridge between humanity and a higher decency history has proven time and time again he is capable of embodying.
5. "Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
Courage is not just taking up a challenge because you know the fight will be easy, it's facing any obstacle that arises before you, even if it may seem overwhelming at first. Even though it might be you who gets overwhelmed by the challenge first, it is only by being overwhelmed do you learn how to overwhelm when you once again find yourself face to face with what got the best of you the first time, perhaps even the second time, and many other times.
Although Harper Lee's career was not fruitful in the quantity of her work, of her insights and deepest convictions that made it into print by no means lacked for a timeless, enduring quality. Enduring not just for the words permanently marking pages in ink bound behind a cover, but for the courage, the compassion, and the foremost humanity that was the soul, and the person of the one and only, Harper Lee.
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