Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

"What's going on?"
"Oh, they just sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer."

"My God, how did this happen?" said Montag. "It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know I'm drowning."

If only they could have taken her mind along to the drycleaner's and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it and brought it back in the morning. If only. . .

Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm.

Maybe they're right, maybe it's best not to face things, to run, have fun.

Here comes a very strange beast which in all tongues is called a fool.

A dwarf on a giant's shoulders of the furthest of the two!

How many times can a man go down and still be alive?

How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you?

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.

The only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there.

It would be funny if it were not serious.

Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day.

Let me come in. I won't say anything. I just want to listen... What is it you're saying?

Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Bum the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.