Quotes on Mockingbird

Atticus, he was real nice." "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.

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.

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

I 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 was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

...but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.

Things are always better in the morning.

Remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work.

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.

I think I'll be a clown when I get grown,' said Dill. Jem and I stopped in our tracks. Yes sir, a clown,' he said. 'There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off.' You got it backwards, Dill,' said Jem. 'Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them.' Well I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks.

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.