Quotes About Literature

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

Four days, eight days, twelve days passed, and he was invited to teas, to suppers, to lunches. They sat talking through the long green afternoons - they talked of art, of literature, of life, of society and politics. They ate ice creams and squabs and drank good wines.

Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me?

Books 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

Sabe que los libros huelen a nuez moscada o a especias de países lejanos?

I try to keep up with what's being done in every field, and most children's books are ten times more enjoyable than the average American novel right now.

As a final note, in these days when we worry and we argue about whether ebooks are real books, I love how broad Ray Bradbury's definition of a book is at the end, when he points out that we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.)

A la gente de color no le gusta El negrito Sambo? Quémalo. ¿Los blancos se sienten incómodos con La cabaña del tío Tom? Quémalo. ¿Alguien escribió una obra acerca del tabaco y el cáncer pulmonar? ¿Los fumadores están afligidos? Quema la obra. Serenidad, Montag. Paz, Montag. Fuera los conflictos. Mejor

Do you ever read any of the books you burn?' He laughed. 'That's against the law!' 'Oh. Of course.' 'It's fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.' They

451° Fahrenheit: la temperatura a la que el papel de los libros se inflama y arde.

Colored 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? Burn the book.

So here, after fifty years, is Fahrenheit 451. I didn't know what I was doing, but I'm glad that it was done.

Fuego brillante Posfacio de Ray Bradbury, febrero de 1993

While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.

So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?

We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here.

Bradbury virtually lived in the public libraries. of his time and came see the shelves as populations of living authors: to burn the book is to burn the author, and to burn the author is to deny our own humanity.

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. He got out of bed. It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking at the world and life.

Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page, from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the secondhand notions and time-worn philosophies.

Este libro tiene poros. Tiene rasgos. Si lo examina usted con un microscopio, descubrirá vida bajo la lente; una corriente de vida abundante e infinita. Cuantos más poros, cuantos más pormenores vivos y auténticos pueda usted descubrir en un centimetro cuadrado de una hoja de papel, más letrado es usted.

I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The only things you're looking for... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for the shore.