Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee

Love’s the only thing in this world that is unequivocal.

“Atticus, I’m throwing it at you and I’m gonna grind it in: you better go warn your younger friends that if they want to preserve Our Way of Life, it begins at home.

“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.

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

“I have. So’s your father. We wondered, sometimes, when your conscience and his would part company, and over what.”

“Oh, not the kind of courage that makes a soldier go across no-man’s-land. That’s the kind that he summons up because he has to. This kind is—well, it is part of one’s will to live, part of one’s instinct for self-preservation. Sometimes, we have to kill a little so we can live, when we don’t—when women don’t, they cry themselves to sleep and have their mothers wash out their hose every day.”

So important nd applicable!!!

“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.”

Excellwnt themetic ideal

“You always have been, you always will be. The only differences you see between one human and another are differences in looks and intelligence and character and the like. You’ve never been prodded to look at people as a race, and now that race is the burning issue of the day, you’re still unable to think racially. You see only people.”

You see only people.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

So true and accurate

the time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re right—”

Very wise

“You may be sorry, but I’m proud of you.”

Purd and hearfelt

“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.”