Fahrenheit 451

“I hate a Roman named Status Quo!” he said to me. “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. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,” he said, “shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”’

Oh, they don’t miss me,’ she said. ‘I’m anti-social, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking about things like this.’

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, 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 difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

“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. And because we know each other.”

“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.

Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he’s the Lord of all Creation.

What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too

‘How’re your children, Mrs Phelps?’ he asked.
‘You know I haven’t any! No one in his right mind, the Good Lord knows, would have children!’ said Mrs Phelps

‘I’m going to do something,’ said Montag. ‘I don’t even know what yet, but I’m going to do something big.’

Happiness is important. Fun is everything. And yet I kept sitting there saying to myself, I’m not happy, I’m not happy.