- He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact.
- I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur! That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?"
- "I don't talk things, sir," said Faber. "I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive."
- "Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself..."
- "We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam."
- "...someday our cities would open up more and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on this 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 seas to tell us we are not so big."
- "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. 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."
- "He would be Montag-plus-Faber, fire plus water, and then, one day, after everything had mixed and simmered and worked away in silence, there would be neither fire nor water, but wine."
nov 23 2011 ∞
sep 3 2012 +