Mockingbird Quotes & Sayings
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I thought of To Kill a Mockingbird. I had finished reading it one night in a bunker, my knees bent and hunched together while mortars hit the ground, the glow of a cigarette and the moon as my only light. Standing there now, chain-smoking, I felt like I finally understood the ending. — Michael Anthony
Hush, little students, we'll say the word,
Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird won't sing,
Mama's gonna write down everything.
And so that book won't look the same,
Mama's gonna add a brand-new name. — Daisy Whitney
Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006] — Harper Lee
Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill. — Harper Lee
'To Kill a Mockingbird' appeared to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed to the top of bestseller lists, where it remained for more than eighty weeks. In 1961, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A film adaptation was released in 1962, starring Gregory Peck, and received three Academy Awards. — Charles J. Shields
But in the book," I say, "the mockingbird is supposed to be a symbol of innocence. That's why it's a sin to kill one."
"Who says it's a symbol of innocence?" asks Mort.
"Teachers," I tell him. "Book reviewers, critics --"
"Wikipedia," Elena calls from behind the window display. — Paul Acampora
That's what I thought, too when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? — Harper Lee
God must've had a blast. painting the stripes on the zebra, hanging the stars in the sky, putting the gold in the sunset. What creativity!
Stretching the neck of the giraffe, putting the flutter in the mockingbird's wings, planting the giggle in the hyena. And then, as a finale to a brilliant performance, He made a human who had the unique honour to bear the stamp, In His Image. — Max Lucado
Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I've tried to live so I can look squarely back at him. — Harper Lee
There was nowhere to go, but I turned to go and met Atticus's vest front. I buried my head in it and listened to the small internal noises that went on behind the light blue cloth: his watch ticking, the faint crackle of his starched shirt, the soft sound of his breathing.
'Your stomach's growling,' I said.
'I know it,' he said. — Harper Lee
My favorite scene in all of movies is Gregory Peck in 'To Kill A Mockingbird': You see him where he's on the porch, and his face is almost completely obscured. I don't want to see his face. — Mary-Louise Parker
Of all days Sunday was the day for formal afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets, men wore coats, children wore shoes. — Harper Lee
Whoa," says Michael.
"What is it?" I ask.
Michael shakes his head in disbelief. He points at the screen. "Wil Wheaton saw an I Kill the Mockingbird flyer and tweeted about it."
"Wil Wheaton?" I say.
"Wil Wheaton!" Michael says again. "Wil Wheaton!"
"Who is Wil Wheaton?"
"Wil Wheaton!"
"Michael," says Elena, "no matter how many times you say his name we still don't know who you're talking about."
"He's a gamer!" Michael takes the mouse from Elena and clicks on Wil Wheaton's profile. "He's a total geek hero! He's an author and an actor. He used to be on STAR TREK."
I point to the description that Wil Wheaton has written about himself. "It says here that he's just a guy."
"Just a guy who used to be on STAR TREK!" says Michael. — Paul Acampora
Mrs. Cheerson, our old teacher? She gave us an essay to write over the holiday. It was on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and it was good, and I think it's stupid to spoil a good book by writing an essay on it. So I didn't do it. — Jaclyn Moriarty
I first read Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' as a teen in school, like you did. I read the book alone, eating lunch at my locker, neatly scored oranges my mother divided into five lines with a circle at the top, so my fingers could dig more easily into the orange skin. To this day, the smell of oranges reminds me of 'Mockingbird.' — Margaret Stohl
Today the mockingbird does not sound very happy. It sounds if it is coming apart. As of the very heart of itself-its song-is breaking into pieces and flying off in a hundred directions. — Jerry Spinelli
I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town - Lee's was in the South, mine the Northwest - but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that. — Chris Crutcher
I would say what was always on her[Harper Lee] mind was the stories she had to tell, and the story was pretty obvious in "To Kill A Mockingbird," maybe a bit - little bit less obvious and more obscure in "Go Set A Watchman." — Wayne Flynt
I was still in college when 'To Kill a Mockingbird' came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out. — Tom Brokaw
I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. — Harper Lee
Thereafter the summer passed in routine contentment. Routine contentment was: improving our treehouse that rested between giant twin chinaberry trees in the back yard, fussing, running through our list of dramas based on the works of Oliver Optic, Victor Appleton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. ( ... ) Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies. — Harper Lee
I have nothing but gratitude for the people who made the film. It was a most unusual experience. I'm no judge, and the only film I've ever seen made was Mockingbird, but there seemed to be an aura of good feeling on the set. I went out and looked at them filming a little of it, and there seemed to be such a general kindness, perhaps even respect, for the material they were working with. I was delighted, touched, happy, and exceedingly grateful. — Harper Lee
'To Kill A Mockingbird' is one of my favourite novels, my mum brought me up reading it, and it never fails to move me. — Jessica Marais
I lived an idyllic 'Huckleberry Finn' life in a tiny town. Climbing trees. Tagging after brothers. Happy. Barefoot on my pony. It was 'To Kill a Mockingbird'-esque. — Sissy Spacek
I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the mockingbird. Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird, or as a being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs. — Thomas Jefferson
I don't read books. I read 'On the Road' in high school, and that was awesome, so I guess that's my favorite book. 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' even though I didn't read it, that's the greatest story. SparkNotes came in when I was in high school, and that was the greatest invention. — Meghan Trainor
I realized I really enjoyed theatre, so I did shows up in Seattle like 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Lost in Yonkers.' — Nick Robinson
It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it. — Charles Bukowski
Branch Bacardi, star of The Da Vinci Load, To Drill a Mockingbird, The Postman Always Cums Twice, Chitty Chitty Gang Bang, The Twilight Bone, A Tale of Two Titties... — Chuck Palahniuk
You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them. — Harper Lee
Even though I didn't think I'd like empathy it kind of creeps up on you and makes you feel all warm and glowy inside. I don't think I want to go back to life without empathy. — Kathryn Erskine
Atticus
" ... said Jem bleakly. "How could they do it, how could they?"
"I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before & they did it tonight & they'll do it again & when they do it
seems that only children weep. — Harper Lee
I grew up in a courtroom kind of like the one you saw in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - big, big courtroom, sometimes it didn't even have air conditioning. — Nancy Grace
To the Richmond Leader in 1966 when the school board banned her novel: "Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is 'immoral' has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink. — Harper Lee
Boo and I walked up the steps to the porch. His fingers found the doorknob. He gently released my hand, opened the door, enter inside, and shut the door behind him. I never saw him again. — Harper Lee
To kill a mockingbird. If you haven't read it, I think you should because it is very interesting. — Stephen Chbosky
No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? — Bertrand Russell
Naturally, you don't sit down in "white hot inspiration" and write with a burning flame in front of you. But since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer, and Mockingbird put itself together for me so accommodatingly, I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse. — Harper Lee
My mother read it when she was a teenager," Henry said, picking a piece of lint off his lap. "To Kill a Mockingbird. The day she accepted my father's proposal, she gave him a copy and told him that Atticus Finch is the kind of father she wants her husband to be. — Ophelia London
Everyone reads Harper Lee personally. For me, 'Mockingbird' was about admitting my own hyphenated identity - about loving and hating my world, about both belonging and not belonging to the community I came from. — Margaret Stohl
'To Kill a Mockingbird' is really two stories. One is a coming-of-age tale told from the point of view of Scout Finch, a girl of about nine, and her slightly older brother, Jem. The second story concerns their father, attorney Atticus Finch, who has been appointed to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping a white woman. — Charles J. Shields
I have 'To Kill A Mockingbird' signed by Harper Lee. That is my prized possession. — Nancy Grace
Kill a Mockingbird's small-town setting is what stuck with NBC's Tom Brokaw, who grew up in small towns throughout South Dakota and knew "not just the pressures that [Atticus] was under, but the magnifying glass that he lived in. This all takes place in a very small environment. People who live in big cities don't have any idea of what the pressures can be like in a small town when there's something controversial going on." When Allan Gurganus read To Kill a Mockingbird, — Harper Lee
A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know
doesn't say much for them, does it? — Harper Lee
Momma's gonna buy you a mockingbird . . . Margo stirred and crawled to her mother, dragging one twisted leg behind her. Maddie followed. They huddled together, the three of them, pressed against the Plexiglas. — Ilona Andrews
For the life of me, I did not understand how he[Atticus] could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic. — Harper Lee
When he was nearly thirty-six, my brother Jem got his heart badly broken when his fourth marriage fell apart, mostly because his wife never could get used to Boo, who lived with them and creeped her out by making little wooden dolls of her and putting them in the hollow tree out front. — Silas House
My favorite book is 'To Kill A Mockingbird' by Harper Lee. It is multi-layered, and I see something new in it every time I read it. — Kimberly Willis Holt
THE MOCKINGBIRD All summer the mockingbird in his pearl-gray coat and his white-windowed wings flies from the hedge to the top of the pine and begins to sing, but it's neither lilting nor lovely, for he is the thief of other sounds - whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges plus all the songs of other birds in his neighborhood; mimicking and elaborating, he sings with humor and bravado, so I have to wait a long time for the softer voice of his own life to come through. He begins by giving up all his usual flutter and settling down on the pine's forelock then looking around as though to make sure he's alone; then he slaps each wing against his breast, where his heart is, and, copying nothing, begins easing into it as though it was not half so easy as rollicking, as though his subject now was his true self, which of course was as dark and secret as anyone else's, and it was too hard - perhaps you understand - to speak or to sing it to anything or anyone but the sky. — Mary Oliver
wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. - ATTICUS FINCH, FROM HARPER LEE'S TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD — Kristin Hannah
We have travelled into the past and returned to find that our present is not quite the same as we left it. Atticus Finch will never again be the white knight we once thought him.
And yet the mockingbird still sings - no longer a song of innocence, but maybe one of experience; a song that combines sorrow, forgiveness - and, ultimately, a kind of hope. — Joanne Harris
Had her conduct been more friendly toward me, I would have felt sorry for her. She was a pretty little thing. — Harper Lee
Then I pace the floor, rocking him softly in my arms, patting his ass. You know I must be really desperate - because I try singing: Hush, little baby, don't say a word Daddy's gonna buy you a . . . I stop - because why the fuck would any baby want a mockingbird? None of those nursery rhymes make any goddamn sense. I don't know any other lullabies, so I go for the next best thing, "Enter Sandman" by Metallica: Take my hand, We're off to never-never land . . . — Emma Chase
Like Scout and her father in To Kill a Mockingbird, my father would pull me onto his lap each night in our four-room apartment and read aloud. — Jim Trelease
Where did you hide your Mockingbirds?" he asks.
"Ornithology," she replies.
"You hid TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD with the bird books?" I ask.
Elena shrugs. "I was being ironic. — Paul Acampora
In White Summer, Joelle Biele exhibits a Roethke-like affinity with nature and natures creatures. At times a miniaturist, Biele constructs exquisite addresses to a heron, cicada, spider, catalpa tree, mockingbird, snail, cormorant, and others. These pitch-perfect poems are written with a delicate, meticulous attention to craft and music. Like the joy she takes in her subjects, this collection is a joy to read. — Elizabeth Spires
I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird.' — John Krasinski
If that mockingbird don't sing and that ring don't shine, I'm a break that birdie's neck. — Eminem
(Brin) 'How good is your lawyer, on a scale of Atticus Finch to Franklin and Bash? — Lisa Henry
You don't have to learn much out of books, it's like if you want to learn about cows, you go milk one. — Harper Lee
I shake my head. I pick up the rake and start making the dead-leaf pile neater. A blister pops and stains the rake handle like a tear. Dad nods and walks to the Jeep, keys jangling in his fingers. A mockingbird lands on a low oak branch and scolds me. I rake the leaves out of my throat.
Me: Can you buy some seeds? Flower seeds? — Laurie Halse Anderson
I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader. — Karin Slaughter
Some folks don't like the way I live. Now I could say the hell with 'em, I don't care if they don't like it. I do say I don't care if they don't like it, right enough - but I don't say the hell with 'em, see? — Harper Lee
I interviewed - no - had lunch with Harper Lee several years ago, trying to convince Harper Lee to do "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the book club. She wouldn't do it. She said, "Honey, I said everything I wanted to say." — Oprah Winfrey
When I was a kid, they bussed us down to a screening of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' in an old theater, and it was just a great experience. — Raymond Cruz
As a matter of fact, I constantly tell audiences all over the world that the single greatest icon of American culture from the publication of "To Kill A Mockingbird" was that novel so that if we say, what conversation can we have that would lead us on a road of tolerance, and teachers have decided that if you're going to teach values in a school in America, the answer that American teachers at all kinds of schools have come up with, just let Harper Lee teach "To Kill A Mockingbird." And then all the teacher has to do is stand back and guide the discussion. — Wayne Flynt
Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How's your entailment gettin' along? — Harper Lee
In 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was just playing and having a good time. — Mary Badham
Atticus sat looking at the floor for a long time. Finally he raised his head. "Scout," he said, "Mr. Ewell fell on his knife. Can you possibly understand?"
Atticus looked like he needed cheering up. I ran to him and hugged him and kissed him with all my might. "Yes sir, I understand," I reassured him. "Mr. Tate was right."
Atticus disengaged himself and looked at me. "What do you mean?"
"Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?"
Atticus put his face in my hair and rubbed it. When he got up and walked across the porch into the shadows, his youthful step had returned. Before he went inside the house, he stopped in front of Boo Radley. "Thank you for my children, Arthur." he said. — Harper Lee
The gum looked fresh. I sniffed it and it smelled all right. I licked it and waited for a while. When I did not die, I crammed it into my mouth: Wrigley's Double Mint. — Harper Lee
Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. — Harper Lee
I've been thinking ... Maybe you're a mockingbird ... Mockingbirds imitate the songs of other birds ... No, I've never heard of any copyright problems. — Charles M. Schulz
So my name is Scout. Yeah, my mom read To Kill a Mockingbird. Leave it to her to think 5th grade required reading is totally deep. — Catherynne M Valente
Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. — Harper Lee
Let's be Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus's children, Scout and Jem, carefully watch their father's behavior as the house next door to theirs burns to the ground. As the fire creeps closer and closer to the Finches' home, Atticus appears so calm that Scout and Jem finally decide that "it ain't time to worry yet." We need to be Atticus. Hands in our pockets. Calm. Believing. So that our children will look at us and even with a fire raging in front of them, they'll say, "Huh. Guess it's not time to worry yet. — Glennon Doyle Melton
He thinks they may also imitate the sounds of birds that are no longer around. He thinks the sounds of extinct birds are passed down the years from mockingbird to mockingbird... He says when a mockingbird sings, for all we know it's pitching fossils into the air. He says who knows what songs of ancient creatures we may be hearing out there. — Jerry Spinelli
The second purchase was my ranch, Mockingbird Hill. The third purchase was Longhorn cattle. — Janine Turner
The wonder is- given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning of texture in time-the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous, pennies found, like mockingbird's free fall. Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from that same free growth, that intricate scramble and twine up and down the conditions of time.
This, then, is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. — Annie Dillard
All theories
like cliches
shot to hell,
all these small faces
looking up
beautiful and believing;
I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe but believe is a
graveyard.
we have narrowed it down to
the butcherknife and the
mockingbird
wish us
luck. — Charles Bukowski
My favorite novel is 'To Kill a Mockingbird' because of its broad sweep, its tackling of big issues in ways that even young minds can make sense of and for the heart of the characters, who span a wide range of ages. I reread it every year. — Ridley Pearson
Bloom County was set in a tidy, rural environment probably because of Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' — Berkeley Breathed
To kill a mockingbird is a sin — Harper Lee
Don't matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house's yo' comp'ny, and don't you let me catch you remarkin' on their ways like you was so high and and mighty! Yo' folks might be better'n the Cunninghams but it don't count for nothin' the way you're disgracin' 'em. — Harper Lee
How could they do it, how could they?'
'I don't know, but they did it.They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do - seems that only children weep — Harper Lee
When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town. — Anne Lamott
About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star. — Annie Dillard
Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods. — Walter Tevis
Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] — Anna Quindlen
Sex was absolutely not allowed to be scheduled, at least not by explicit discussion, but I had become familiar with the sequence of events likely to precipitate it: a blueberry muffin from Blue Sky Bakery, a triple shot of espresso from Otha's, removal of my shirt, and my impersonation of Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. — Graeme Simsion
A mockingbird has moved into our neighborhood. It perches atop a telephone pole behind our backyard. Every morning it is the first thing I hear. It is impossible to be unhappy when listening to a mockingbird. So stuffed with songs it is, it can't seem to make up it's mind which to sing first, so it sings them all, a dozen different songs at once, in a dozen different voices. On and on it sings without a pause, so peppy, even frantic, as if its voice alone is keeping the world awake. — Jerry Spinelli
I thought she was going to spit in it, which was the only reason anybody in Maycomb held out his hand: it was a time-honored method of sealing oral contracts. Wondering what bargain we had made, I turned to the class for an answer, but the class looked back at me in puzzlement. — Harper Lee
I've become one of those people who prowl around at night in their cars. God, I am the town's Boo Radley, just like in To Kill A Mockingbird. — Kathryn Stockett
Books are useless! I only ever read one book, To Kill A Mockingbird, and it gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds! - Homer Simpson — Matt Groening
I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself. — Harper Lee
'To Kill a Mockingbird' represents Hollywood at its very finest, when a popular film could truly contain a message. It has one of the most moving scores of all time. — Mark Mothersbaugh
When I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was so struck by the universality of small towns. — Tom Brokaw