Harper Lee Quotes

Being the 8th out of 10 kids, and being the one that stayed in trouble, I sort of became a momma's boy.

When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.

I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels - children and poets both tend to feel.

Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.

The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house.

Relations between parents and children and siblings and mates. This is not external. We can't separate them.

There are accidental parents, but there are no accidental children. There are illegitimate parents, but there are no illegitimate children.

I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child.

...I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible. ...And perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents.

Children always think they did something wrong when their parents disappear.

Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

Many of our newly smart would rather be found murdering their children than being kind to their parents. They would prefer to be damned for rudeness than to be snickered at for courtesy.

The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

My parents told me I must get married. I was seen as a failure if I didn't do it.

I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.

the experience of having brothers and sisters, born of the same parents, sleeping under the same roof, eating at the same table, is an inescapable, delightful and repelling, desired and abhorred part of each child's life.

If you're a parent, the five worst words you can say to your children are, "When I was your age ..." You were never their age. You were older in the womb.

there is such a rebound from parental influence that it generally seems that the child makes use of the directions given by the parent only to avoid the prescribed path.

It's especially hard to admit that you made a mistake to your parents, because, of course, you know so much more than they do.

Why didn't children ever see that they could damage and harm their parents as much as parents could damage and harm children?

As marriage produces children, so children produce care and disputes; and wrangling.

Children will listen to anything elders say to survive, and if you grew up without an elder telling you there was a god, what did your parents say to you?

The suspicious parent makes an artful child.