To Kill a Mockingbird Key Themes and Quotes

To Kill a Mockingbird Key Themes and Quotes

1. Prejudice

   • "Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks"
   • "Why, one sprig of nut-grass can ruin a whole yard."
   • "Inside...was a white, waxy, perfect camellia."
   • "It won't be many years, Jean Louise, before you become interested in clothes and boys"
   • "a Drinking Streak, a Gambling Streak, a Mean Streak, a Funny Streak."
   • "evidently taking delight in corrupting a child"
   • "In our courts all men are created equal"
   • "Hypocrites, Mrs Perkins, born hypocrites....At least we don't have that sin on our shoulders"
   • "Over here we don't believe in persecuting anybody."
   • whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.”

2. Education

   • you tell him ill try and take over from here and try to undo the damage"
   • Calpurnia, the black maid. is the person who taught Scout how to read
   • we don't write in the first grade we print
   • your father doesn't know how to teach
   • shows education system is rigid and therefore ill fitting for some children.
   • Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts
   • Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”(

3. Good Parenting

   • "Don't matter who they are, anybody sets foot in this house's yo' comp'ny"
   • "Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets."
   • "if I didn't I couldn't hold my head up in the town"
   • "If this thing's hushed up it'll be a simple denial to Jem of the way I've tried to raise him."

4. Bad Parenting

   • "Ain't no snot-nosed slut of a schoolteacher ever born c'n make me do nothin'!"
   • "His curtness stung me."
   • "a little bantam cock of a man"
   • "like the playhouse of an insane child"
   • "You goddamn whore, I'll kill ya"

5. Empathy and Understanding

   • "You never really understand a person... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
   • "Jem, she's old and ill. You can't hold her responsible for her actions."
   • "That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me."
   • "Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in"
   • "It's like bein' a caterpillar in a cocoon"
   • "it's because he wants to stay inside"
   • "Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?"
   • "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."
   • You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
   • “I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
   • think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside.”

6. Innocence and its Removal

   • "did you put cement in that hole in that tree down yonder?"
   • "Children...can spot an evasion quicker than adults"
   • "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. ... That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
   • "I don't care one speck. It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way."
   • "You haven't even seen this town, but all you gotta do is step back inside the courthouse."
   • "Because you're children and you can understand it"
   • "and his shoulders jerked as if each 'guilty' was a separate stab between them"
   • He likened Tom's death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds"
   • "Will you take me home?"
   • “They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night.”
   • “I ain’t cynical, Miss Alexandra. Tellin’ the truth’s not cynical, is it?”
   • “I'm little but I'm old.”

7. Courage

   • "do I show it?"
   • “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.
   • "I wanted you to see what real courage is....According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew."
   • Broke the last remaining code of childhood
   • fight the fight if the battles right otherwise if you don't you comply with it
   • “Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
     • "Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win"
   • “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.”

8. Racism

   • "it ain't your fault if Uncle Atticus is a nigger-lover"
   • "Negroes worshipped in it on Sundays and white men gambled in it on weekdays."
   • "She owned a bright green square Brick and a black chauffeur, both kept in an unhealthy state of tidiness"
   • "You know what we want. Get aside from the door, Mr Finch."
   • "just in-betweens, don't belong anywhere"
   • "I seen that black nigger yonder ruttin' on my Mayella!"
   • "Jedge, I've asked this county for fifteen years to clean out that nest down yonder."
   • "Mr Finch, if you was a nigger like me, you'd be scared, too."
   • "You felt sorry for her, you felt sorry for her?"
   • "Cry about the hell white people give coloured folk, without even stopping to think that they're people, too."
   • "that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings..."

9. Justice

   • Let the dead bury the dead this time
   • if you were a nigger like me you would be worried to
   • if a man like atticus finch wants to butt his head aganst a stone wall its his head
   • Maycomb county courthouse) is a view indicating a people determined to preserve ever physical scrap of the past
   • We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.”