Mockingbird Quotes

“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.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“Reading is too intimate,' Spofforth said. 'It will put you too close to the feelings and ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Age. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“When literacy died, so had history.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living. Synthetic”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“I have never in my life seemed to see and hear and think so clearly. Can it be because I have not used drugs this day? Or is it this act of writing? The two are so new and have come together so closely that I cannot be sure of which it is. It is extremely strange to feel like this. There is exhilaration to it, but the sense of risk is almost terrifying.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“New York is nearly a grave. The Empire State Building is its gravestone.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“But most of all, it seems to me now, has been the courage to know and to sense my feelings that has come, slowly, from the emotionally charged silent films at the old library at first and then later from the poems and novels and histories and biographies and how-to-do-it books that I have read. All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“They were willing to accept their stringent piety, and silence, and sexual restraints, all unthinkingly, along with a few platitudes about Jesus and Moses and Noah; they were overwhelmed, however, at the effort it would require to understand the literature that was the real source of their religion. I”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“The face on the box was, Paul had told me, the face of Jesus Christ. It was used to sell a lot of things. ‘Vestigial reverence’ was the term Paul read somewhere that was supposed to be the idea, probably a hundred or more blues ago, when such things were all planned out.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth. There have been others who have felt as I feel and who have, at times, been able to say the unsayable. 'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods. I am the way and the truth and the life. He that believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live.' My life is light, waiting for the death wind. Like a feather on the back of my hand.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“La mia vita è leggera, e attende il vento della morte, come una piuma sul dorso della mia mano.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“The archives voice was a long time replying. I had never heard a computer take so long. Or maybe it was merely the way I felt. Finally the voice came back and said, ‘Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“When they were gone Spofforth sat at his desk for a while, wondering about the news of the man who said he could read. He had heard of reading often enough when he was young, and knew that it had died out long before. He had seen books—very ancient things. There were still a few of them left undestroyed in the University Library.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“The Age of Technology has rusted.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“Muszę dostać się do tej biblioteki! Muszę znów zdobyć książki. Jeżeli nie będę mógł czytać, uczyć się i mieć dostępu do spraw, o których warto myśleć, to wolę dokonać samospalenia niż dalej żyć.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“When in doubt, forget it.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“What difference did it make if I had my Privacy and my Self-reliance and my Freedom if I felt like this? I was in a state of yearning, and I had been for years. I was not happy—had almost never been happy.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“Lately,’ she said, ‘I’ve been trying to memorize my life.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“Perhaps the grimness and coldness that I see everywhere exist because there are no children. No one is young anymore. In my whole life I have never seen anyone younger than I am. My only idea of childhood comes from memory, and from the obscene charade of those robot children at the zoo. I must be at least thirty. When my child comes he will have no playmates. He will be alone in a world of old and tired people who have lost the gift for living.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“Todos esos libros, incluso los aburridos y casi incomprensibles, me han hecho comprender más claramente lo que significa ser un ser humano. Y he aprendido de la sensación de asombro que a veces desarrollo cuando me siento en contacto con la mente de otra persona muerta hace mucho tiempo y sé que no estoy solo en esta tierra. Ha habido otros que se han sentido como yo me siento y que, en ocasiones, han podido decir lo indecible”.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“I could visualize them then, the men who had decided sometime in the distant past what the purpose of human life on earth really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the Rules of Privacy and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules that the rest of mankind would live by until we all died out and left the world to the dogs and cats and birds.
They would have thought of themselves as grave, serious, concerned men—the words “caring” and “compassionate” would have been frequently on their lips. They would have looked like William Boyd or Richard Dix, with white hair at the temples and rolled-up sleeves and, possibly, pipes in their mouths, sending memos to one another across paper-and-book-piled desks, planning the perfect world for Homo sapiens, a world from which poverty, disease, dissension, neurosis, and pain would be absent, a world as far from the world of the films of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson—the world of melodrama and passions and risks and excitement—as all their powers of technology and “compassion” could devise.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“- O que você faz exatamente com um livro?
- Você lê.
- "Oh", disse ela. "E o que significa 'ler'?" Balancei a cabeça. Então comecei a virar as páginas do livro que estava segurando e disse: - "Essas marcações aqui representam sons. E os sons formam palavras. Você olha para as marcações e se lembra dos sons, e aí você pratica bastante, e elas começam a soar como se você estivesse ouvindo uma pessoa falando. Falando - mas em silêncio.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies—sexual and economic and narcotic—upon the automobile. And the automobile paved the way for more profound – more inward- inner dependencies upon Television and then robots, and finally the ultimate and predictable conclusion of it all: the perfection of the chemistry of the mind…It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinker Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered, drug-addicted fool. 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.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“Reading is too intimate," Spofforth said. "It will put you too close to the feelings and ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies—sexual and economic and narcotic—upon the automobile.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird