And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.
He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact.
The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.
They all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.
Think I’ll go eat me a doughnut and take me a nap.
Fire is bright and fire is clean.
It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be magic. You shouldn’t weep happy and then sad and then happy again. But you do. And I do. And we all do.
Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.
A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might jump in front of his killer and try to stop it.
If only someone else’s flesh and brain and memory. If only they could have taken her mind along to the dry cleaner’s and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it and brought it back in the morning. If only...
That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.
If there were no war, if there was peace in the world, I’d say fine, have fun! But, Montag, you mustn’t go back to being just a fireman. All isn’t well with the world.
Or did you have your fingernails honed on a whetsone, my darling?
So swift was the motion that her bedroom slippers were left standing on the stepladder rungs.
Chapter 31 NOTHING MUCH else happened, all the rest of that night.
Be your own self. Love what YOU love.
Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you’re a squirrel?
The man was cold as an albino frog.
Going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for dinner.
Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.