We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing...It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they st...
Tom, said Douglas, just promise me one thing, okay? It's a promise. What? You may be my brother and maybe I hate you sometimes, but stick around, all right? You mean you'll let me follow you and the o...
Three in the morning, thought Charles Halloway, seated on the edge of his bed. Why did the train come at that hour? For, he thought, it’s a special hour. Women never wake then, do they?
This summer night deep down under the stars was all the things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.
They read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlor was so empty and gray-looking
They felt the wings on their fingers and elbows flying, then, suddenly plunged in new sweeps of air, the clear autumn river flung them headlong where they must go. Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve!...
These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.
There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
The sun rose yellow as a lemon.The sky was round and blue.The birds looped clear water songs in the air.Will and Jim leaned from their windows.Nothing had changed.Except the look in Jim's eyes.Last ni...
The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen...
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.
THERE ARE THOSE DAYS WHICH SEEM A TAKING in of breath which, held, suspends the whole earth in its waiting. Some summers refuse to end.
Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally bright, did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this...
So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.
So, lost, erased, you seek a lifetime's days for itAnd dig deep to find the sweet instructions there Put by when God first circuited and printed thee to life:Go hence! do this! do that! do yet another...
Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh?' ... There sat Beatty, perspiring gently,...
She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and th...
School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, ple...
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.