Quotes About Curiosity

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. 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.

You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it.

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.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it. You've got to say, Well, to hell with you. And the cat says, Wait a minute. He's not behaving the way most humans do. Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?

Faber sniffed the book. "Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy.

Perhaps I expected to look in and find a giant canary, stretched out on a carpet of dust, songless, capable of only heart murmurs for talk.

See the world: It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

Look at it this way, child, life is a magic show, or should be if people didn't go to sleep on each other. Always leave folks with a bit of mystery, son.

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.

The children guessed, if they did not whisper it, that all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way. In

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day sleeping its life away. To hell with that, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his butt.

Let us remain childlike and not childish in our 20-20 vision, borrowing such telescopes, rockets, or magic carpets as may be needed to hurry us along to miracles of physics as well as dream.

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

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.

Leaning into the wall as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there.

Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows. What's it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy? Do they even know I'm HERE?

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual", of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.

She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why.

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.

But most of all," she said, "I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going.