They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.
War!” The thought stood in Sim’s brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived. But why? Wasn’t life short enough without fighting, killing?
The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.
So I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World’s Fairs and began to write. And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition.
There, on the world’s rim, the lovely snail gleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherry-colored semaphore to the stars.
The ice. And the lovely hollows, the horizontal flow of emptiness within the ice. The lovely nothingness. The exquisite flow of an invisible mermaid daring the ice to capture it.
A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that’s how it turned out.
Taking your pinch of arsenic every morn so you can survive to sunset. Another pinch at sunset so that you can more-than-survive until dawn. The mirco-arsenic-dose swallowed here prepares you not to be poisoned and destroyed up ahead.
Irritations and angers aside, what about loves? What do you love most in the world? The big and little things, I mean.
The important things are those passed down to us from their hands and minds and these are full to bursting with animal vigor and intellectual vitality. Their hatreds and despairs were reported with a kind of love.
Things are balanced. Our minds, to even things, to balance the unfairness of our living, go back in on ourselves, to find what there is that is good to see.
The cloudy sun poured light through all the sky.
Don’t you realize that if you are not careful you’ll miss all of life?
And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.
Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.
He realised he and his mother were alone. Her hand trembled. He felt the tremble. Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than himself, wasn’t she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace? That groaning out of darkness? That crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assaults of midnights? Doubts flushed him.
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm.
Where would you like to go? What would you really like to do with your life?
You see, no one Believes a really all-encompassing and protective love when they see it clear.