Casey Cep > Quotes

“Water, like violence, is difficult to contain.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“He might not have believed in what he preached, he might not have believed in voodoo,” she wrote of the Reverend, “but he had a profound and abiding belief in insurance.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“History isn’t what happened but what gets written down,”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Self-pity is a sin,” she told a reporter in 1963, already frustrated, only three years after Mockingbird. “It is a form of living suicide.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Nothing writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never transform into words, & no matter how many pages of notes & interviews & documents a reporting trip generates, the one that matters most always starts out blank.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“a tragic roster of activists and innocents had died for the crime of being black or supporting blacks in their state. There was Willie Edwards Jr., the truck driver forced off a bridge to his death by four Klansmen in Montgomery. There was William Lewis Moore, the man from Baltimore shot and killed in Attalla while trying to walk a letter denouncing segregation 385 miles to the governor of Mississippi. There were four young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There was thirteen-year-old Virgil Lamar Ware, shot to death on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle in the same city. There was Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion while he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a protest. There was the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian minister beaten to death in Selma. There was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot by Klansmen while trying to ferry marchers between Selma and Montgomery. There was Willie Brewster, shot to death while walking home in Anniston. There was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian registering black voters who was arrested for participating in a protest and then shot by a deputy sheriff in Hayneville. There was Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., murdered by a gas station owner after arguing about segregated restrooms.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“He had wanted to bring a new kind of politics to Alabama: “the politics of reason, not race; of unity, not division; of concern for all citizens, not callous disregard of some for the sake of others.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Nobody recognized her. Harper Lee was well known, but not by sight, and if she hadn’t introduced herself, it’s unlikely that anyone in the courtroom would have figured out who she was.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Like a lot of small town bookworms, she was too well-read to be a true country bumpkin, but too country to be anything but mesmerized by Manhattan. She had enough books to read, and movies to see, and museums to visit to last her several lifetimes. The city overwhelmed and delighted her.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“her five favorite novels: Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Richard Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Vengeance is as old as violence.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“But Hohoff had correctly identified the scenes with children as the strongest parts of Go Set a Watchman and The Long Good-Bye, and she thought that the young Scout would make the best narrator. Lee, who had written her first novel in the third person, wrote her second in the first, and then finally settled on the stereoscopic first-person voice of child and adult that appears in To Kill a Mockingbird.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Monroeville was hard to get to and easy to get stuck in.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“It was better to believe that, in the face of conjuring, there was nothing that law enforcement and the judicial system could do than to believe that, in the face of terrible crimes, they had not done enough.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“What put an end to this was power. Man’s dominion over the earth might have been given to him in Genesis, but he began acting on it in earnest in the nineteenth century. Steam engines and steel and combustion of all kinds provided the means; manifest destiny provided the motive. Within a few decades, humankind had come to understand nature as its enemy in what the philosopher William James called, approvingly, “the moral equivalent of war.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“The answer, soon enough, was a staff writer. Nelle wanted to be a writer, too, but her parents were as present as his were absent, and they expected all of their children, especially the girls, to get an education. As a result, in 1944, Lee left Monroeville to attend Huntingdon College. Situated on a beautiful campus not far from where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived during their Montgomery years, Huntingdon was a small women’s school run by the Methodist Church. Alice”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Six weeks shy of graduation, Nelle Lee dropped out. It had become obvious to her that a writer is someone who writes, and also that sooner or later everyone disappoints their parents: better, she figured, to get started on both.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Before his death, A.C. had taken to answering to Atticus and signing his name that way when anyone asked him to autograph his daughter's novel; the year after he died, Gregory Peck carried his pocket watch as he accepted the Academy Award for best actor.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“More than mere transcripts, Lee's voluminous notes are those of a careful observer, a keen legal mind, and a tragicomic chronicler of American history. She recorded for Capote the height of Mrs. Clutter's socks and the length of Nancy Clutter's mirror - registering even the reflection that wasn't there and exactly how much of herself the girl could have taken in every morning before school.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“She had enough books to read--and movies to see, and museums to visit--to last her several lifetimes.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“The South would gladly have done without the Reverend Maxwell, too, but unlike them he had very little chance of getting out of it, even if he had wanted to. Six million African Americans went north and west during the Great Migration, but many millions more stayed behind. Among them was Maxwell, who lived in one of the many small towns the civil rights movement seemed to have passed by. What Harper Lee knew about Tom Radney’s South instinctively, she could have learned about Willie Maxwell’s South only through patient research and ongoing conversations of the kind that very few white Americans, then as now, ever have.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“There’s no news in a newsroom”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama offered an unconventional but romantic explanation for why Alabamians were drawn to voodoo and susceptible to other superstitions.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“By the time that Lee and Capote headed to Kansas with their notebooks and without any press credentials, true crime had been a popular genre in America for well over three hundred years. But it was In Cold Blood that would make crime writing respectable. Back in the 1930s, a librarian turned crime reporter named Edmund Pearson had written a few murder stories for The New Yorker, as had the humorist and occasional journalist James Thurber around that same time. Yet it was only when Capote’s articles on the Clutter killings appeared serially in four issues of the same magazine that true crime became something critics and scholars took seriously.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“bad legislation included a serious, if inexplicable, effort to remove Alabama from the United Nations, which made it through the house but not the senate; a bill that would have allowed the legislature to approve or reject speakers at state schools, which Tom managed to quash,”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Violence has a way of destroying everything but itself. A murdered person's name always threatens to become synonymous with her murder; a murdered person's death always threatens to eclipse her life. That was especially true of an economically marginal black woman in Alabama.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Capote - living on Park Avenue, working as an office boy at The New Yorker. He walked the halls of 28 West Forty-Fourth Street like a ballerina, carrying pencils and wearing a cape; the first time the editor in chief, Harold Ross, ever saw Capote, he asked:"What's that?"

Harper Lee - she had become distracted by the city itself. Like a lot of small town bookworms, she was too well-read to be a true country bumpkin, but too country to be anything but mesmerized by Manhattan.

Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Ellison’s Invisible Man appeared in 1952,”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Burkett lived across the street from the Lees and took such an interest in Nelle that the two stayed close until Burkett died. "She is my closest friend in Monroeville and has been all my life," Lee once said, revealing not only the appetite she had for intellectual friendships but also the deep estrangement of a bright young woman from her hometown.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“Court reporters, who weren’t yet salaried, cobbled together wages by printing up their trial transcripts and peddling them directly to the public.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee