Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!"

"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."

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."