Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.
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.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.
I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t “try” to do things. You simply “must” do things.
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
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.
Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.
A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
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.
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.
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 were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires.
I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?
The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.
It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.
We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing.
We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.
Everything that happens before Death is what counts.
When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.
How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.
And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again…
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
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.
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can’t sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.”]
Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.
Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.
Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.
To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.
I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.
Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They’ll never live the way you live. Go do it.
Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.
We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.
The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
Don’t they get afraid, then?””They have a religion for that.
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 home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.
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.
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.
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.
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
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.
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.
His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!
The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
It’s important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book… it’s perfume, it’s incense, it’s the dust of Egypt…
[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.
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.
And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before.
Where’s your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.
In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.
Strange. Half my years afraid of life. The other half, afraid of death. Always some kind of afraid.
I’m afraid of them and they don’t like mebecause I’m afraid.
I’m afraid of them and they don’t like me because I’m afraid.
We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.
That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.
War is a bad thing, but peace can be a living horror
There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished.
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
There was her face, like a summer peach, beautiful and warm, and the light of the candles reflected in her dark eyes. [He] held his breath. The entire world waited and held its breath.
But souls can’t be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.
They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.
We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law.
Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?
No,” said a voice, “the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.
We haven’t been too bad, have we?””No, nor enormously good. I suppose that’s the trouble – we haven’t been much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of awful things.
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 headed for shore.
Her eyes reversed into herself, to watch the secret heart of herself pounding itself into pieces against the side of her chest.
Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.
The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.
See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts.He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great séance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.
Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
It is a subliminal thing. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.
That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. … If we did not know we’d die, we’d wander around and sleep like cats.
And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.
I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.
We need to make progress. Otherwise we’re waiting for news in a world where there is no longer any news.
Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.
Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words.
People die every day, psychologically speaking. Some part of them gets tired. And that small part tries to kill off the entire person.
My feet,” said Montag. “I can’t move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet won’t
Come on, get up, get up, you can’t just sit! But he was still crying and that had to be finished.
Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.
Look at it this way, child, life is a magic show, or should be if people didn’t go to sleep on each other. Always leave folks with a bit of mystery, son.
Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.
It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.
Men are men, unfortunately, no matter what their shape, and inclined to sin.
Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.
There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine.
See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.
You could see her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish – some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy, and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being nothing but colour and nothing else.
I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.
Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.
I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.
The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?
Business or profession?”I guess you’d call me a writer.’No profession,’ said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.
Do you ever wonder if–well, if there are people living on the third planet?”The third planet is incapable of supporting life,’ stated the husband patiently. ‘Our scientists have said there’s far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.
We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.” – The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950)
We lived longer but at a price. We had to be our own children, having none.
Raw, gentle, and easy, it mizzled out of the high air, a special elixir, tasting of spells and stars and air, carrying a peppery dust in it, and moving like a rare light sherry on his tongue. Rain.
There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children’s playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree.
That’s all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.
She didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.
But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.
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.
No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers, and sweet autumns.
When Douglas walked, his mind ran, when he ran, his mind walked.
When a man talks from the heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.
It doesn’t think anything we don’t want it to think.”That’s sad,’ said Montag, quietly, ‘because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that’s all it can ever know.
I have been the patient one. I have waited for the world to stop being silly. I have waited for it to stop wars. I have waited for politicians to be honest. I have waited for real estate men to be good citizens. But while I wait, I dance!
Create a character with an obsession, then follow.
It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
And metaphors like cats behind your smile,Each one wound up to purr,each one a pride,Each one a fine gold beast you’ve hid inside (…)
He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.
You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!
Looking at her in the hospital he had thought, I don’t know you, who you are, does it matter if we live or die?
He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.
To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.
We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But one strange year, halloween came early….don’t you ditch me jim nightshade…don’t talk death. Someone might hear…
Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it’s up to you to know with which ear you’ll listen.
You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by.
No,” moaned Tom in despair. “School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer’s even over! Ruin half the vacation!
I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.
The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home.
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.
Look for the little loves. Find and shape the little bitternesses.
I’m being ironic. Don’t interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite. There!
How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you?
In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect,nevertheless.
That’s the good part of dying; when you’ve nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.
The dust was antique spice, burnt maple leaves, a prickling blue that teemed and sifted to earth. Swarming its own shadows, the dust filtered over the tents.
Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them; it is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave.
It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious.
Whatever she is now she’s better than she was,” said Bedloe. “Being dead is better than being dull, being dead is better than not being aware.
And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear.
I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.
He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.
Why then you’re as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust ‘reality’ and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.
The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years.
There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.
If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve.
You should’ve thought of that before becoming a fir
The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.
The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. (“Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds”)
I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well and good.
Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.
They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
Remember, Montag, we’re the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.
Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day..
Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
Somewhere on the Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save The World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle.
It was a simple thing. All terror is a simplicity. (“Interval In Sunlight”)
Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered…sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks…
He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did.
When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!–when you were off to Tanganyika in ’98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?
The Internet is a big distraction. It’s distracting, it’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.
Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.
…passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.
Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.
Beer’s intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.
Well, I’ve kept you waiting long enough,” he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself.
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
The mosquitos were gone from the porch, and surely when they abandoned the conflict the war with Time was really done, there was nothing for it but that humans also forsake the battleground.
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?
Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.
There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit or become a children’s playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree.
Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.
They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they’re fascinated with the snake-pit.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.
You can’t try to do things you simply must do them.
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.
I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.
When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.
I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true – hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.
Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.
A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
We’ve gotta reinvest in space travel. We should’ve never left the moon.
Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.
Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don’t do that.
I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.