Francie is smart she thought.  She must go to high school and maybe beyond that.  She’s a learner and she’ll be somebody someday.  But when she gets educated, she will grow away from me.  Why she’s growing away from me now.  She does not love me the way the boy loves me.  I feel her turn away from me.  She does not understand me.  All she understands is that I don’t understand her.  Maybe when she gets educated she’ll be ashamed of me – the way I talk.  But she will have too much character to show it.  Instead she will try to make me different.  She will come to see me and try to make me live in a better way and I will be mean to her because I’ll know she’s above me.  She will figure out too much about things as she grows older; she’ll get to know too much for her own happiness. She’ll find out one day that I don’t love her as much as I love the boy.  I cannot help it that this is so. But she won’t understand that. Sometimes I think she knows that now. Already she is growing away from me; she will fight to get away soon. Changing over to that far-away school was the first step in her getting away from me. But Neeley will never leave me, that is why I love him best. He will cling to me and understand me. I want him to be a doctor. He must be a doctor. Maybe he will play the fiddle, too. There is music in him. He got that from his father. He has gone farther on the piano than Francie or me. Yes, his father has the music in him but it does him no good. It is ruining him. If he couldn’t sing, those men who treat him to drinks wouldn’t want him around. What good is the fine way he can sing when it doesn’t make him or us any better? With the boy, it will be different. He’ll be educated. I must think out ways. We’ll not have Johnny with us long. Dear God, I loved him so much once -  and sometimes I still do. But he’s worthless…worthless.  And God forgive me for ever finding it out.

Thus Katie figured everything out in the moments it took them to climb the stairs. People looking up at her – at her smooth pretty vivacious face – had no way of knowing abut the painfully articulated resolves formulating in her mind.

We present our society as being on of free initiative, individualism, and idealism, when in reality these are mostly words. We are a centralized managerial industrial society, of an essentially bureaucratic nature, motivated by materialism which is only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns.

On the way downtown he was so completely alone with his terrible error that he felt the necessity for the strange warmness and goodness that came from a familiar and gentle voice speaking in the night. Already, in a few short hours, it seemed that he had known Faber a lifetime. Now he knew that he was 2 people, that he was, above all, Montag who knew nothing, who did not even know himself a fool, but only suspected it. And he knew that he was also the old man who talked to him and talked to him as the train was sucked from one end of the night city to the other on one long sickening gasp of motion. In the days to follow, and in the nights when there was no moon and in the nights when there was a very bright moon shining on the earth, the old man would go on with this talking and this talking , drop by drop, stone by stone, flake by flake. His mind would well over at last and he would not be Montag anymore, this the old man told him, assured him, promised him. He would be Montag-plus-Faber, fire plus water, and then one day, after everything had mixed and simmered and worked away in silence there would be neither fire nor water, but wine. Out of two separate opposite things, a third. And one day he would look upon the fool and know the fool. Even now he could feel the long journey, the leave-taking, the going-away from the self he had been.

What a dreadful surprise. For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are. But lets not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up with you, it’s too late, isn’t it Montag?

Hank, I want nothing from you except what you wish to give me. Do you remember that you called me a trader once? I want you to come to me seeking nothing but your own enjoyment. So long as you wish to remain married, whatever your reason, I have no right to resent it. My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me, not by your suffering or mine. I don’t accept sacrifice and I don’t make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I’d leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be brought by the paid of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don’t do it in business, Hank. Don’t do it in your own life.

Destruction is the price of any contradiction.

Part of the intensity of her relief – she thought, as she walked by his side – was the shock of contrast: she had seen with the sudden, immediate vividness of sensory perception, an exact picture of the what the code of self-sacrifice would have meant, if enacted by the three of them. Galt, giving up the women he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling our of existence and himself out of her life, no matter what the cost to him and to her, then dragging the rest of his years through the waste of the unreached and unfulfilled – she, turning for consolation to a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake, since her will to self-deceit was the essential required for Galts self-sacrifice, then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection, plus the tenet that love is futile and happiness is not to be found on earth. Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two people who were dearest to him, and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved, but only a resented substitute, 1/2 charity patient, 1/2 crutch, his perceptiveness becoming his danger and only his surrender to the lethargic stupidity protecting the shoddy structure of his joy, struggling and giving up and settling into the dreary routine of the conviction that fulfillment is impossible to man – the three of them, who had all the gifts of existence spread out before the, ending up as embittered hulks, who cry in despair that life is frustration – the frustation of not being able to make unreality real.

This book changed my life. I can’t say it’s my favorite anymore, but I am including something for the sake of it.

I came here to say I do not recognize anyones right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. The world is perishing from an orgy of self sacrificing. I wished to come here to say that the integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable en devour.