Go Set a Watchman Quotes

“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“[T]he time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re right”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“She was almost in love with him. No, that’s impossible, she thought: either you are or you aren’t. Love’s the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it’s a you-do or you-don’t proposition with them all." (Chapter 1)”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“If you did not want much, there was plenty.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“You deny them hope. Any man in this world, Atticus, any man who has a head and arms and legs, was born with hope in his heart. You won’t find that in the Constitution, I picked that up in church somewhere. They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Sometimes we have to kill a little so we can live.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Don’t you study about other folks’s business till you take care of your own.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, 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.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Autumn was her happiest season.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m something else and I don’t know what.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“But a man who has lived by truth—and you have believed in what he has lived—he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing. I think that is why I’m nearly out of my mind.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Don’t push her. Let her go at her own speed. Push her and every mule in the county’d be easier to live with.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody...”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“You are fascinated with yourself. You will say anything that occurs to you, but what I can’t understand are the things that do occur to you. I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re nose-heavy, too much of them and we’re tail-heavy—it’s a matter of balance.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“I can't beat you, I can't join you.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not wanted. We have secrets.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“We wondered, sometimes, when your conscience and his would part company, and over what.” Dr. Finch smiled. “Well, we know now. I’m just thankful I was around when the ructions started. Atticus couldn’t talk to you the way I’m talking—” “Why not, sir?” “You wouldn’t have listened to him. You couldn’t have listened. Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“She did not stand alone, but what stood behind her, the most potent moral force in her life, was the love of her father. She never questioned it, never thought about it, never even realized that before she made any decision of imprtance the reflext, 'What would Atticus do?' passed through her unconscious; she never realized what made her dig in her feet and stand firm whenever she did was her father; that whatever decent and of good report in her character was put there by her father; she did not know that she worshiped him.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“She went to him. “Atticus,” she said. “I’m—” “You may be sorry, but I’m proud of you.” She looked up and saw her father beaming at her. “What?” “I said I’m proud of you.” “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand men at all and I never will.” “Well, I certainly hoped a daughter of mine’d hold her ground for what she thinks is right—stand up to me first of all.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“text for today is taken from the twenty-first chapter of Isaiah, verse six: For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way. The easy way out of this would be to marry Hank and let him labor for her. After a few years, when the children were waist-high, the man would come along whom she should have married in the first place. There would be searchings of hearts, fevers and frets, long looks at each other on the post office steps, and misery for everybody. The hollering and the high-mindedness over, all that would be left would be another shabby little affair à la the Birmingham country club set, and a self-constructed private Gehenna with the latest Westinghouse appliances. Hank didn’t deserve that.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“But a man who has lived by truth—and you have believed in what he has lived—he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman