Life according to Harper Lee

On love and marriage

'Love whom you will but marry your own kind was a dictum amounting to instinct within her.'

- Go Set a Watchman

On the meaning of life

''Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.''

- Go Set a Watchman

On parents

'Our mother died when I was two, so I never felt her absence... I did not miss her, but I think Jem did. He remembered her clearly, and sometimes in the middle of a game he would sigh at length, then go off and play by himself behind the car-house. When he was like that, I knew better than to bother him.'

- To Kill a Mockingbird

On money

'The Cunninghams never took anything they can't pay back – no church baskets and no scrip stamps. They never took anything off anybody. They get along with what they have. They don't have much, but they get along with it.'

- To Kill a Mockingbird

On death

'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.'

- To Kill a Mockingbird