Why, he’s the last peach, high on a summer tree.
Nothing ever likes to die – even a room.
How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?
The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so.
They softly issued forth exhalations of air that smelled like ancient yellow beasts.
Look at yourself then. Consider everything you have fed yourself over the years. Was it a banquet or a starvation diet? Who are your friends? Do they believe in you? Or do they stunt your growth with ridicule and disbelief? If the latter, you haven’t friends. Go find some.
It became a game that I took to with immense gusto: to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves, or picking wild grapes with my father and brother, rediscovering the mosquito-breeding ground rain barrel by the side bay window, or searching out the smell of the gold-fuzzed bees that hung around our back porch grape arbor. Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
Montag looked at these men whose faces were sunburnt by a thousand real and ten thousand imaginary fires.
A trolley car, a pair of tennis shoes? These, at one time when we were children, were invested with magic for us.
He must ask himself, “What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?” and begin to pour this on paper.
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.
There was a smell like a cut potato from all the land, raw and cold and white from having the moon on it most of the night.
A whole summer ahead to cross off the calendar, day by day. Like the goddess Siva in the travel books, he saw his hands jump everywhere, pluck sour apples, peaches, and midnight plums. He would be clothed in trees and bushes and rivers. He would freeze, gladly, in the hoarfrosted ice-house door. He would bake, happily, with ten thousand chickens, in Grandma’s kitchen.
The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth.
It is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the world.
You stumble into it, mostly. You don’t know what you’re doing, and suddenly, it’s done. You don’t set out to reform a certain kind of writing. It evolves out of your own life and night scares.
Whoever he was or whatever he was and no matter how different and crazy he seemed, he was not crazy.
For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are.
Oh, Dad. I never knew you. I sure know you now.
But we live surrounded by paradoxes. One more shouldn’t hurt us. The fact is simple enough. Through a lifetime, by ingesting food and water, we build cells, we grow, we become larger and more substantial. That which was not, is. The process is undetectable.