Quotes About Perception

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.

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.

After all, each story is a Rorschach Test, isn't it? And if people find beasties and bedbugs in my ink-splotches, I cannot prevent it, can I? They will insist on seeing them, anyway, and that is their privilege. Still, I wish people, quasi-intellectuals, did not try so hard to find the man under the old maid's bed. More often than not, as we know, he simply isn't there.

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.

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.

Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning.' He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable. 'And if you look'—she nodded at the sky—'there's a man on the moon.' He hadn't looked for a long time.

I never thought of God as humorous," said Father Stone. "The Creator of the platypus, the camel, the ostrich, and man? Oh, come now!

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.

Douglas opened one eye. And everything, absolutely everything, was there. The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

Whatever she is now she's better than she was, said Bedloe. Being dead is better than being dull, being dead is better than not being aware.

This age thinks better of a gilded fool than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school.

I'm antisocial,they say. I don't mix. It's so strange.I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this. She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. Or taking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice.

You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to think what I've asked you.

Coloured 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.

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.

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

My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.

So it must seem. Good to evil seems evil.

They run amuck; I let them. Pride of lions in the yard. Stare and they burn a hole in your retina. A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion.

The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in the windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters.

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. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

And Will? Why, he's the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?

They got Indian vision and can sight back further than you and me will ever sight ahead.

Se dan cuenta, ahora, de por qué los libros son odiados y temidos? Muestran los poros del rostro de la vida. La gente comodona sólo desea caras de luna llena, sin poros, sin pelo, inexpresivas. Vivimos en una época en que las flores tratan de vivir de flores, en lugar de crecer gracias a la lluvia y al negro estiércol.