See the fish...Just like war. War swims along, sees food, contracts. A moment later - Earth is gone.
The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
Most of my short stories are fantasy.
Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.
Maybe I don't have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don't we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?
My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead.
I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them.
If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt light, whispering and sighing.
I felt a bit bookish, cut off from life.
The multicolored or grey lights touching their faces, but never really touching them...
You fail, only if you stop writing.
Sneezes pent but set like traps, the boys crouched, stood, lay sweating a cool and constant brine.
My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.
Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.
You're very tired, he said. You've traveled a long way and you belong to a tired people who've been without faith a long time, and you want to believe so much now that you're interfering with yourself. You'll only make it harder if you kill. You'll never find him that way.
Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?
He had seen her painted sign by the road: Skin Illustration! Illustration instead of tattoo! Artistic!
Can't you recognize the human in the inhuman?
Surprise is where creativity comes in.
For the first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it would be better for his health.
For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is CERTAIN, that nothing bad will ever happen to ME. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there ARE. But let's not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up to you, it's too late, isn't it, Montag?
You pay a certain penalty for going your own way. A lot of people think you're nuts, and you're not as popular with girls as you should be.
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.
If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Christ, you could massacre half a Hindu village and still look like Peter Rabbit. What are you stuffed with?
And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between.
Don't listen," whispered Faber. "He's trying to confuse. He's slippery. Watch out.
At least you were a fool about the right things, said Faber.
Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.
For your file...in case you decide to be angry with me.
And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddam steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up.
We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks...And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me.
Only recently, glancing at the novel, I realized that Montag is named after a paper manufacturing company. And Faber, of course, is a maker of pencils! What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus.
So the carnival steams by, shakes ANY tree: it rains jackasses.
You who walk the earth know only the moment, which is whisked away with your next exhalation.
Life as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay inside a burning house; there must be something there!
In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale.
Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect,nevertheless.
But most of all, she said, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going.
Thus with the wisest of you all; you are ever unfixed.
There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.
Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had the strength to rouse up, you'd slaughter your half-dreams with a buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that's burned dry.
A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time. I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the river on an oil-slick, garbage infested midnight. I turn about on my own parentage. I inoculate against those very biles that brought me to light. I am a serum born of venoms. I am the antibody of all time.
In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.
