Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Are you happy?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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