Quotes About Reality

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.

No, said a voice, the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.

Why then you're as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust 'reality' and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

The entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can't have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

The multicolored or grey lights touching their faces, but never really touching them...

After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. // Pictures? No, they lie. You're not the picture. My dear, you're not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You're not these trunks of junk and dust. You're only you, here, now—the present you.

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.

What a dreadful surprise. For everyone knows, is absolutely certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are. But lets not talk about em eh? By the time the consequences catch up to you its too late isn't it?

He had felt a braveness which he had thought to be the genuine thing, and now he knew that it had been nothing but shock and the objectivity possible in shock.

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great séance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

Don't haggle and nag them; you were so recently of them yourself. They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won't run on. They don't know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it'll have to hit. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.

Ya no existe el cohete. Nunca existió. Ni la gente. No hay nadie en todo el universo. Nunca hubo nadie. Ni planetas. Ni estrellas. Eso decía. Y luego algo acerca de sus pies y sus piernas y sus manos: No mas manos, decía. Ya no tengo manos. Nunca las tuve. Ni cuerpo. Nunca lo tuve. Ni boca. Ni cara. Ni cabeza. Nada. Solamente espacio. Solamente el abismo.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living.

Who said childhood was the best time of life? When in reality it was the most terrible, the most merciless era, the barbaric time when there were no police to protect you, only parents preoccupied with themselves and their taller world.

No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

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.

You don't ask a dream if it is real, or you wake up.

For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on.

les livres ne racontent rien. Rien que tu puisse croire ou enseigner aux autre. Si ce sont des romans, ils parlent d'êtres qui n'existent pas, de produits de l'imagination. Dans le cas contraire, c'est encore pire. Chaque professeur traite l'autre d'idiot. Chaque philosophe essaie de brailler plus fort que son adversaire. Ils galopent tous dans tous les sens, obscurcissant les étoiles, éteignant le soleil. On en sort complètement perdu.

It is a subliminal thing. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.

They are so confident that they will run on for ever. But they won't run on. They don't now that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that someday it'll have to it. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.

Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back, hoping and waiting