Quotes About Books

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.

I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.

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.

We do need knowledge. . . 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.

Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple the population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?

I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.

Where'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!

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?' ... There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm.

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.

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house, there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why I feel like I'm putting on weight, I feel fat. I feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and don't konw what. I might even start reading books.

The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard, reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montage. "You can't ever have my books," she said.

we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.)

Well, Montag, take my word for it, I've had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about non-existent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're non-fiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost.

Do you know why books such as this are so important? They have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me, it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass screaming past an infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper the more literary you are. That's my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail.

Live in the library, for Christ's sake! Don't live on your goddamn computers and the internet and all that crap. Go to the library!

We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.

Le cose che voi cercate, Montag, sono su questa terra, ma il solo modo per cui l'uomo medio potrà vederne il novantanove per cento sarà un libro.

My men are my references. They're waiting outside for the books. They're dangerous. Men like that always are.

The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were. We

There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever.

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 percent of them is in a book.