The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.
The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water.... The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water....
Summer was over. Of course you can't tell in Los Angeles.
Some day our cities would open up and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we’re allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that ca...
She was beginning to shriek now, sitting there like a wax doll melting in its own heat.
Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.
Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.
Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.
Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we...
Once the bomb release was yanked, it was finished. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world, l...
Oiled, with tube bones cut from bronze and sunk in gelatin, the robots lay. In coffins for the not dead and not alive, in planked boxes, the metronomes waited to be set in motion. There was a smell of...
Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now,...
October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mi...
My gosh, if you’re going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would’ve talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!
Montag tried to see the men's faces, the old faces he remembered from the firelight, lined and tired. He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that hardly seemed to be there...
Mistakes can be profited by.
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!
Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people in the town for a little while and sweat you...
Leaning into the wall as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there.
Kerosene, he said, because the silence had lengthened, is nothing but perfume to me.