Go Set A Watchman: Readers' favourite lines from Harper Lee's second novel

The most highlighted lines on Kindle range from quotes about justice and prejudice to views about how women should behave around men

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Harper Lee's anticipated follow-up to To Kill A Mockingbird was released on Monday 13 July after lying undiscovered in a safety deposit box for 60 years.

Although written in the mid Fifties before the publication of Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Go Set A Watchman is set 20 years after the events of To Kill A Mockingbird, featuring Scout as as sexually liberated young woman, and Atticus as an apparent bigot.

Amazon has released the most highlighted passages of the book from avid Kindle readers, showing which sentences resonated most with fans of Lee's writing.

Readers' favourite lines from Go Set A Watchman

• “But few people took advantage of the roads, and why should they? If you did not want much, there was plenty.”

• “The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, 'He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman,' had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.”

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

• “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.”

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

• “Her favorite game was golf because its essential principles consisted of a stick, a small ball, and a state of mind.”

• “Alexandra was one of those people who had gone through life at no cost to themselves; had she been obliged to pay any emotional bills during her earthly life, Jean Louise could imagine her stopping at the check-in desk in heaven and demanding a refund.”

• “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”

• “Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.”

• “First,” he said dispassionately, “hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.”