Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"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."

"I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?"

"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."

"Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Are you happy?"

"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."