I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver’s Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
My heart stopped talking because it didn’t want to talk anymore for a while.
By night the wires on the high poles tell evil tales in the dripping mist.
A Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Tyrant Lizard, the most incredible monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you, we’re not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry.
You want to cry some more, go on ahead. I did the same last night.” “You, sir?” “God’s truth. Thinking of everything ahead. Both sides figuring the other side will just give up, and soon, and the war done in weeks, and us all home. Well, that’s not how it’s going to be. And maybe that’s why I cried.
But stop and think. What does the word with truly mean? Wits, intelligence. That’s all it means. Knowledge so any man or woman with half a brain and inclination toward learning had his wits about him, ey? And so anyone too smart who didn’t watch out, was called a witch.
Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures. Sometimes it is a little hard to tell the trash from the treasure, so we hold back, afraid to declare ourselves.
Leave these people alone. They’ve got something good and decent, and you come and foul up the nest and sneer at it. Well, I’ve talked to them too. I’ve gone through the city and seen their faces, and they’ve got something you’ll never have – a little simple faith, and they’ll move mountains with it. You, you’re boiled because someone stole your act, got here ahead and made you unimportant.
I am not one thing. I am many things that America has been in my time. I had enough sense to keep moving, learning, growing. And I have never reviled or turned my back on the things I grew out of.
Pipkin: an assemblage of speeds, smells, textures. A cross section of all the boys who ever ran, fell, got up, and ran again.
Because I wanted to do, I did. Where I wanted to feed, I fed.
What is fire? It’s a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.
Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn’t that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There’s all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that.
There’s a relationship between the great poems of the world and the great screenplays: they both deal in compact images.
We all need someone higher, wiser, older to tell us we’re not crazy after all, that what we’re doing is all right.
There are some people who live to be thirty-five or forty, but because no one ever notices, their lives are candle-brief, invisible-small.
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.
One fire would destroy all of us, no matter who started it, for what reason.
That’s how I think of children, cruel as they sometimes are, mean as I know they can be, but not yet showing the meanness around their eyes or in their eyes, not yet full of tiredness. They’re so eager for everything! I guess that’s what I miss most in older folks, the eagerness gone nine times out of ten, the freshness gone, so much of the drive and life down the drain. I like to watch school let out each day. It’s like someone threw a bunch of flowers out the school front doors.
He hung up his black beetle-colored helmet and shined it; he hung his flameproof jacket neatly; he showed luxuriously, and then, whistling, hands in pockets, walked across the upper floor of the fire station and fell down the hole.