Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

...to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big.
When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, some day it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.

Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy.

"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." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice... But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not... They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball... Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lamp-posts, playing `chicken' and 'knock hub-caps. I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another... Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?"

Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.

One time, when he was a child, in a power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon....

We're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.

Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are?

No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies.... Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

I rarely watch the 'parlour walls' or go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts.

What is there about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it? It's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out.
What is fire? It's a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.

The universe... won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.

Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone?

"Then you don't care any more?"
"I care so much I'm sick."

The falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms.

To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that. But what else. What else? Something, something. . .