I claim no victory. But there was blood on my gloves when I hung them up. When was the last time you did a story like that, out of pure indignation?
Let me make it clear. People die every day, psychologically speaking. Some part of them gets tired.
Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity.
A regrettable situation,” said Bierce, smiling, “for the Yuletide merchants who, toward the last there, as I recall, were beginning to put up holly and sing Noel the day before Halloween. With any luck at all this year they might have started on Labor Day!
Nadie tiene ya tiempo para nadie.
But Clarisse’s favorite subject wasn’t herself. It was everyone else, and me. She was the first person in a good many years I’ve really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted.
I’ll burn, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.
It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead...
Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.
You have a right to youth. Go now, if you want. Because if you stay you’ll have no time for anything but working and growing old and dying at your work. But it is good work.
Softly, softly, like two white paper lanterns on a night wind, the women moved over their lifetime and their past, and over the meadows where the tent cities glowed and the highways where supply trucks would be clustered and running until dawn. They hovered above it all for a long time.
The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams.
Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.
I hate a Roman named Status Quo.
So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long.
I had no way to stop. I did not write Fahrenheit 451, it wrote me.
The two women passed like needles, sewing one tree to the next with their perfume.
And as before, it was good to burn, he felt himself gush out in the fire, snatch, rend, rip in half with flame, and put away the senseless problem. If there was no solution, well then now there was no problem, either. Fire was best for everything.
What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don’t ask.
He saw many hands held to its warmth, hands without arms, hidden in darkness. Above the hands, motionless faces that were only moved and tossed and flickered with firelight. He hadn’t known fire could look this way. He had never thought in his life that it could give as well as take.