Quotes About Discovery

What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

You stumble into it, mostly. You don't know what you're doing, and suddenly, it's done. You don't set out to reform a certain kind of writing. It evolves out of your own life and night scares.

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. 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 shore.

These essays were written at various times over a thirty-year period, to express special discoveries, to serve special needs. But they all echo the same truths of explosive self-revelation and continous astonishment at what your deep well contains if you just haul off and shout down it.

Meet him in the air?" Tom snorted, "good grief, talk about horrible directions to nowhere.

So you go in a library, and you pull a book off the shelf, and you open it, and what are you looking for? A mirror. All of a sudden, a mirror is there and you see yourself.

We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks...And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me.

This will be the one trip of your life. Keep your eyes wide.

I blundered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see.

We got caught reading nights with flashlights under our sheets, right? So, nobody'll suspect an old jar of fireflies; folks'll think it's just a night museum.

Take it where you can find it, in old photograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.

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.

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

I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.

But why, Mr. Stendahl, why all this? What obsessed you?" "Bureaucracy, Mr. Garrett. But I haven't time to explain. The government will discover soon enough." He nodded to the ape. "All right. Now." The ape killed Mr. Garrett.

The great thing about growing up with science fiction is that you have an interest in everything.

La maggior parte di noi non può correre dappertutto, parlare con chiunque, conoscere tutte le città del mondo, perché non ha il tempo, i soldi e neppure tanti amici. Le cose che cerca, Montag, sono nel mondo, ma il solo modo che l'uomo medio può conoscerle è leggendo un libro».

Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dime-store window. They stood there, unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there. 'Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!' 'Oh, my gosh!' 'Nickel tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!' 'Don't look. Maybe it's just a mirage.

Wandering alone in the library, letting his broom tell him things no one else could hear, he had heard the whistle and the disjointed calliope hymns.

It became a game that I took to with immense gusto: to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves, or picking wild grapes with my father and brother, rediscovering the mosquito-breeding ground rain barrel by the side bay window, or searching out the smell of the gold-fuzzed bees that hung around our back porch grape arbor. Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

A trolley car, a pair of tennis shoes? These, at one time when we were children, were invested with magic for us.

We theorize about what goes on in the brain, but it is mostly undiscovered country. A writer's work is to coax the stuff out and see how it plays. Surprise, as I have often said, is everything.

GRANDPA'S LIBRARY WAS A FINE DARK PLACE bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

Nuk e di. I kemi të gjitha ç'duhen për të qenë të lumtur, e prapë s'jemi dot të lumtur. Diçka mungon. Kërkova përreth dhe pashë se e vetmja gjë që më mungonte ishin librat, ata që unë i kisha djegur gjatë gjithë këtyre dhjetë a njëzet vjetve të fundit. Dhe atëherë mendova se ndoshta janë librat ata që do të më ndihmojnë.