Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.

But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.

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, streaming past in 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. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.

"There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this" - I gestured encompassingly - "will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

Thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

[...] nettopp nå huska jeg bare kroppen hans mot kroppen min da han var liten og jeg bar han under armen overalt hvor jeg gikk; den fastheten, den tilliten, og de få orda han sa om igjen og om igjen, som var de eneste orda han kunne, og navnet mitt var ett av dem, og jeg ville ikke slippe.

– Han lærer aldri å gå ordentlig, sa mora mi.

– Slipp han nå for guds skyld ned. Men jeg ville ikke slippe, og han ville ikke ned.

I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it—or my observation of it—is temporary?

“I’m like. Like. I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”

I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointment in the Department of Having a Voice That Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.

“You don’t look stupid. You look like a princess and I look like an ogre.”

“You don’t look like an ogre.”

“I was bragging,” I told her.

I have forgotten what it is like to be warm and what a full night’s sleep feels like and what my name sounds like spoken instead of shouted across yards of sand.

At one point, he started singing at his desk, not because he was happy, but because he forgot not to.

He had a fine voice, and an excellent smile, and feet that twinkled when he danced.

Jeg har ofte tenkt at det å være barn er som å leve under ei osteklokke. Verden er aldri større enn det du ser i øyeblikket.

De var allerede gjennom oppvarmingsøvelsene av dytting og skjellsord da han fikk øye på Jessica. Hun stod ved skoleporten og snakket med en venninne da hun hørte lydene og snudde hodet, og han så hvordan hun stivnet til og lot ranselen skli ned langs siden før hun knyttet nevene og kom mot dem. Allerede lenge før hun kom frem så han noe hardt i ansiktet hennes, noe som gjorde at han var glad han ikke var en av de guttene, at han ikke var en av dem som et øyeblikk senere ble rykket etter håret så de falt i bakken eller tuppet i leggene og bedt om å forsvinne. Da de var alene, reiste han seg og børstet av buksene, før han møtte blikket hennes. "Skal vi slå følge hjem?" Hun plukket opp vesken hans, rakte den mot han mens hun så ham inn i øynene. Så lo hun, en høy og smittende latter.