I’ve heard there are still hobo camps all across the country, here and there; walking camps they call them, and if you keep walking far enough and keep an eye peeled, they say there’s lots of old Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los Angeles.
The courthouse clock struck the hour. The sounds blew across a town that was empty, emptier than it had ever been. Over empty streets and empty lots and empty lawns the sound faded.
Only recently, glancing at the novel, I realized that Montag is named after a paper manufacturing company. And Faber, of course, is a maker of pencils! What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus.
Where strangers scanned each other’s faces and found yesterday’s sunrise instead of tomorrow’s midnight.
Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth? But when he was held, rootless, in midair, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn’t something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane.
Queer duck. Sensible, though. Stay that way, Dougie-boy. Fear nothing, ever in life. Life’s full of things not worth fearing. Bodies are bodies and blood is blood. The only bad things are those we make in our minds. We teach each other fear. We learn reactions to certain stimuli.
The Martians were there – in the canal – reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water...
But no man’s a hero to himself. I’ve lived with me a lifetime. Will. I know everything worth knowing about myself –.
For God’s sake, what are you doing?” shouted Garrett, rattling about. “I’m being ironic. Don’t interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite.
The boy looked down at his feet deep in the rivers, in the fields of wheat, in the wind that already was rushing him out of the town. He looked up at the old man, his eyes burning, his mouth moving, but no sound came out.
Los mayores y los chicos siempre pelean porque son de razas distintas.
She made empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked in their nostrils as they plunged about.
He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.
I do wish to run, seize this greatest time in all the history of man to be alive, stuff my senses with it, eye it, touch it, listen to it, smell it, taste it, and hope that others will run with me, pursuing and pursued by ideas and ideas-made machines.
Don’t let them take your crying, turn it upside down and use it for their own smile! I’ll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags.
Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can’t believe it!
Even now he could feel the start of the long journey, the leave taking, the going away from the self he had been.
Don’t judge a book by its cover,” someone said.
I am a passionate, not an intellectual writer, which means my characters must plunge ahead of me to live the story.
Remember, you’re remarkable. Our whole family is odd and remarkable. We can’t mix or marry with ordinary folk. We’d lose our magical powers if we did.