Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The fire was not burning; it was warming!... He hadn't known fire could look this way.

"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."

"Sometimes I sneak around and listen... and do you know what?"
"What?"
"People don't talk about anything."

Can't trust people, that's the dirty part.

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non? combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with.

Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it.

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

You always dread the unfamiliar.

She was the first person in a good many years I've really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted.

Fahrenheit 451: The temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns.

"Well," she said, "I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane."

Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the inter-action of the first two.

Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?

Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

“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.”