01c. 1966 ADBut we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
02c. 1966 ADBooks were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
03c. 1966 ADThe problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
04c. 1966 ADWe have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing...It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
05c. 1966 ADIt's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt...Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
06c. 1966 ADLast night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
07c. 1966 ADHow in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! 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? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
08c. 1966 AD[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
09c. 1966 ADOnly 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 interaction of the first two.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
10c. 1966 ADThere is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
11c. 1966 ADAnd I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
12c. 1966 ADWhere's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
13c. 1966 ADThe most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we musn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
14c. 1966 ADHe felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
15c. 1966 ADSo few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
16c. 1966 ADThey began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
17c. 1966 ADIn order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
18c. 1966 ADStrange. Half my years afraid of life. The other half, afraid of death. Always some kind of afraid.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
20c. 1966 ADWe cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
21c. 1966 ADGod, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
22c. 1966 ADThat's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
23c. 1966 ADTheir hands slapped library door handles together, their chests broke track tapes together, their tennis shoes beat parallel pony tracks over lawns, trimmed bushes, squirreled trees, no one losing, both winning, thus saving their friendship for other times of loss.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
