24 quotes
Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.
Mockingbird (1980)
The woman beside me hesitated a moment, and then said softly, “This man is different, Mary. He’s a Reader.”
Mockingbird (1980)
Smart is smart. I’m glad there’s some around somewhere.
Mockingbird (1980)
I must get inside that library! I must have books again. If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living.
Mockingbird (1980)
What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?
Mockingbird (1980)
It is the greatest achievement of my life. Yes, I have used that word: a great achievement. My learning to read was an achievement. Nobody knows that but me.
Mockingbird (1980)
I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.
Mockingbird (1980)
It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fire—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.
Mockingbird (1980)
I was not as awed by Rules as I had once been.
Mockingbird (1980)
I knew that there had been books in the ancient world, of course, and that most of them were probably from that time before television, but I had no idea there were that many.
Mockingbird (1980)
Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment.
Mockingbird (1980)
When literacy died, so had history.
Mockingbird (1980)
Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a “great man.” I am not certain I like the idea of “great men”; it makes me uncomfortable. “Great men” often have had very bloody plans for mankind.
Mockingbird (1980)
“Would you show me how to make an omelette?”
She looked shocked, and said nothing.
Then from the sink the other woman’s voice said, “Men don’t cook.”
The woman beside me hesitated a moment, and then said softly, “This man is different, Mary. He’s a Reader.”
Mockingbird (1980)
Biff is really stupid in most ways. It’s just that she’s very real—is very much a cat—and that makes her seem intelligent to you. I can read her whole mind at a glance, and there’s very little there. But she feels good. She would not want to be anything other than a cat.
Mockingbird (1980)
Holy Bible begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not give the century of the “beginning,” nor is it clear who “God” is, or was. I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real.
Mockingbird (1980)
All day yesterday she read a new kind of writing called poems. Some of them she read aloud. In places they were like chess—incomprehensible—and in other places they said strange and interesting things.
Mockingbird (1980)
They had told us how important courts were for protecting our sacred rights to Privacy and Individuality, and how helpful a judge could be, but you somehow got the idea that it was a good idea to stay away from courts altogether.
Mockingbird (1980)
The sky at the top of the gray ocean has become much lighter now. The sun is about to rise. I will end this recording for now and stop the bus and walk outside and watch the sun rise over the ocean.
My God, the world can be beautiful.
Mockingbird (1980)
We had never developed a sense of history as such; all we knew, if we ever thought about it, was that there had been others before us and that we were better than they. But no one was ever encouraged to think about anything outside of himself. “Don’t ask; relax.”
Mockingbird (1980)