Top 83 Mockingbird Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children. ~To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 16, spoken by the character Atticus
Harper Lee
#5. I realized I really enjoyed theatre, so I did shows up in Seattle like 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Lost in Yonkers.'
Nick Robinson
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. '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
#10. If that mockingbird don't sing and that ring don't shine, I'm a break that birdie's neck.
Eminem
#11. 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
#12. I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird' ... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.
Harper Lee
#13. 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
#14. I would come, many years later, to understand why 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is considered 'an important novel', but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.
Walter Tevis
#18. 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
#19. In 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was just playing and having a good time.
Mary Badham
#20. Oh Mockingbird have you ever heard words that I've never heard
Bob Marley
#21. Well, for starters, Abraham Lincoln didn't write 'To Kill a Mockingbird.
Jeff Kinney
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Harper Lee
#26. 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
#27. Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." "Miss
Harper Lee
#28. When I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was so struck by the universality of small towns.
Tom Brokaw
#29. The second purchase was my ranch, Mockingbird Hill. The third purchase was Longhorn cattle.
Janine Turner
#30. 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
#31. To kill a mockingbird. If you haven't read it, I think you should because it is very interesting.
Stephen Chbosky
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I have finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.
Stephen Chbosky
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. I have 'To Kill A Mockingbird' signed by Harper Lee. That is my prized possession.
Nancy Grace
#44. Bloom County was set in a tidy, rural environment probably because of Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
Berkeley Breathed
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. I love 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson's 'Behind The Scenes At The Museum' - that's the book that started me writing.
Jojo Moyes
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird wouldn't it?
Harper Lee
#52. '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
#53. This case is just as racist as the fictional, but unfortunately all too typical case, in 'To Kill a Mockingbird'.
John Simon
#54. A Tale of Two Kisses. To Kiss a Mockingbird. As I Lay Kissing.
Nicola Yoon
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. No, I mean I can smell somebody an' tell if they're gonna die. An old lady taught me how. Jean
Louise
Finch, you are going to die in three days.
Harper Lee
#60. 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
#61. Of all days Sunday was the day for formal afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets, men wore coats, children wore shoes.
Harper Lee
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How's your entailment gettin' along?
Harper Lee
#65. You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.
Harper Lee
#66. It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.
Charles Bukowski
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Understanding people's difficulties and - just as crucial - helping people understand their own difficulties and teaching them concrete ways to help themselves will help them better deal with their own lives and, in turn, ours.
Kathryn Erskine
#71. Had her conduct been more friendly toward me, I would have felt sorry for her. She was a pretty little thing.
Harper Lee
#72. 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
#73. (Brin) 'How good is your lawyer, on a scale of Atticus Finch to Franklin and Bash?
Lisa Henry
#74. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.
Harper Lee
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man.
Harper Lee
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Dill was in hearty agreement with this plan of action. Dill was becoming something of a trail anyways, following Jem about ... He only grew closer to Jem. (Lee 55)
Harper Lee
#83. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
