# Quote — Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

> Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics, but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said; I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.
>
> Why can no one read? What happened?

- Author: [Walter Tevis](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-tevis.md)
- Book: [Mockingbird](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-tevis/mockingbird.md)
- Page: 114
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walter_Tevis#Mockingbird_(1980)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-tevis/mockingbird/why-dont-we-talk

## More from this book

> And then I began to feel it, the whole enormous scope of it, in what had begun in some dark antiquity of trees and caves and the plains of Africa; of human life, erect and ape-like, spreading itself everywhere and building first its idols and then its cities. And then dwindling to a drugged trace, a remnant, because of a failed machine. A tiny part of a failed machine. And a more-than-human robot that would not try to repair it.

p. 239 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-tevis/mockingbird/and-then-i-began.md)

> Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”

p. 22 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-tevis/mockingbird/noticing-and-thinking.md)

> 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.

p. 140 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-tevis/mockingbird/holy-bible-begins.md)