Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."

"Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones."

"But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last."

"There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."

"The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."

"The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school."

"Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore."

"I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense."

"Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

"We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up."

"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."

"Why is it,"he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?""Because I like you,"she said, "and I don't want anything from you."

"For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person..."

"The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour."

"These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be."

"Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones."

"Hello!"He said hello and then said, "What are you up to now?""I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it. "I don't think I'd like that,"he said. "You might if you tried.""I never have."She licked her lips. "Rain even tastes good.""What do you do, go around trying everything once?"he asked. "Sometimes twice."

"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us."

"He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?"

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away."