How do you contrive to live here without books? ... take my books away, and I should be desperate!
In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction.
It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order..
It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden.
The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
He risked what could have been a relentlessly lonely path, but found company in the characters of the books he loved.
— How can you read this? There's no pictures!
— Well, some people use their imagination.
— I'll go ahead and download it.
— Why don't you buy paper books? E-books lack character.
— Is that right?
— Books aren't just something you read. They're like a form of meditation.
— Meditation?
— Sometimes, when I'm not feeling well, I read books but I don't really absorb them. When that happens, it makes me think about what could be getting in the way. There are also books that I can absorb even when I'm feeling down. Sometimes I wonder why. It could be like mental conditioning. I think it's all about the stimulation your brain receives when you turn the pages. The feeling of flipping them over, one by one.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
The only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.
To write a story is to write about a person, and how that person should live and die.
— Those books, how much?
— Hm?
— The leather-bound books.
— The Collected Works of Charles Dickens.
— They're real leather?
— They're real Dickens.
— I have to know because they have to go with a sofa. Everything else in my house is real. I'll give you two hundred.
— Two hundred what?
— Two hundred pounds!
— Are they leather-bound pounds?
— No.
— Sorry, I need leather-bound pounds to go with my wallet. Next!
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.