sparky shell

All he could do was reflect bitterly, as he had occasion to do each and every day, on the terrible disappointment of getting what you thought you wanted, only to discover it wasn't, that you'd been cheated out of something you couldn't even name.

He knew from personal experience that the world was rational until it wasn't, after which all bets were off.

People professed to love straight lines, which provided them, after all, with the shortest distance between two points, but Raymer had come to believe that, deep down, humans preferred to meander.

Well--I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower--and I don't.

2 years later I got your message

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.

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it's too late.

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