It’s always someone else’s husband dies, they say.
Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating. Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.
Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.
Fire is bright and fire is clean. That way lies melancholy. Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world.
Ah, no, ah, no. There, senor, you would be wrong. Knowing that after the first year the rent is liable not to be paid, we bury the poorest two feet down. It is less work, you understand? of course, we must judge by the family who owns a body.
Do you ever read any of the books you burn?’ He laughed. ‘That’s against the law!’ ‘Oh. Of course.’ ‘It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.’ They.
Nothing extraordinary about me except I’m fifty-four, which is always extraordinary to the man inside it.
The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All.
Now this greatest tent staled out hot raw breaths of earth, confetti that was ancient when the canals of Venice were not yet staked, and wafts of pink cotton candy like tired feather boas. In rushing downfalls, the tent shed skin; grieved, soughed as flesh fell away until at last the tall museum timbers at the spine of the discarded monster dropped with three canon roars.
Way late at night Will had heard – how often? – train whistles jetting steam along the rim of sleep, forlorn, alone and far, no matter how near they came. Sometimes he woke to find tears on his cheek, asked why, lay back, listened and thought, Yes! they make me cry, going east, going west, the trains of far gone in country deeps they drown in tides of sleep that escape the towns.
More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.
So many people are. Afraid of firemen, I mean. But you’re just a man, after all...
They walked over to the body, thinking that perhaps they could still save the man’s life. They couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some way to help the man. It was the natural act of men who have not accepted death until they have touched it and turned it over and made plans to bury it or leave it there for the jungle to bury in an hour of quick growth.
Ei, si lucrurile produse in serie au devenit mai simple. Odinioara, cartile ii interesau doar pe cativa oameni, risipiti ici, colo. Le dadea mana sa fie altfel decat ceilalti. Lumea era incapatoare. Dar dupa aceea lumea s-a umplut de ochi, de coate, de guri. Populatia a crescut de doua ori, de trei ori, de patru ori. Filmele si radioul, revistele si cartile au devenit toate o apa si-un pamant, un fel de coca facuta dupa aceeasi reteta.
And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear.
Now, sucking all the night into his open mouth and blowing it out pale, with all the blackness left heavily inside himself...
We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law.
Intuited novels are far more ‘true’ than all your scribbled data-fact reportage in the history of the world!
Don’t ever be a Rocket Man.” I stopped. “I mean it,” he said. “Because when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that.