iheartgoodbooks.com

In Ray Bradbury’s classic novel firemen don’t put out fires–they start them in order to burn books. Good, albeit scary, stuff.

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?

A movie by Richard Linklater

One second of dream consciousness is much longer than one second of actual consciousness.

What are the barriers that stop humans from living up to their full potential? Which is the most universal human characteristic, fear or laziness?

Dream travel. Controlling your dreams to experience things your waking consciousness couldn’t handle.

It seems like everybody’s sleep walking through their waking state or wake sleeping through their dreams.

Looking back, all that really mattered was connecting with the people.

Written by Ayn Rand

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.

By Daniel Quinn

One of the most striking features of the Taker culture is its passionate and unwavering dependence on prophets.

Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: That he doesn’t know how he ought to live.

There are 4 things the Takers do that are never done in the rest of the community, and these are fundamental to their civilizational system.

1. They exterminate their competitors
2. They systematically destroy their competitors food to make room for their own
3. They deny their competitors access to food
4. ???

Human settlement isn’t against the laws of competition, it’s subject to them.

Famine isn’t unique to humans. All species are subject to it everywhere in the world.

It’s hard to sit by and let people starve? This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the worlds divinely appointed ruler. I will not let them starve. I will not let the drought come. It is the gods who let these things, not you.

The noble savage theory. The idea of people living close to nature tend to be noble. The story the Takers have been enacting here for the past ten thousand years isn’t only disastrous for mankind and the world, it’s fundamentally unhealthy and unsatisfying. It’s a megalomaniac’s fantasy, and enacting it has given the Taker’s a culture riddled with greed, cruelty, mental illness, crime, and drug addiction. The story the Leavers have been enacting here for the past 3 million years isn’t a story of conquest and rule. Enacting it doesn’t give them power. Enacting it gives them lives that are satisfying and meaningful to them.

The Takers are those who know good and evil and the Leavers are those who live in the hands of the gods.

Amazingly enough, mans destiny is plain. He’s the trailblazer, the pathfinder. His destiny is to be the first to learn that creatures like man have a choice: they can try to thwart the gods and perish in the attempt, or they can stand aside and make some room for the rest. But it’s more than that. His destiny is to be the father of them all – I don’t mean by direct descent – By giving all the rest their chance – the whales, dolphins, chimps, raccoons – he becomes in a sense their progenitor…Oddly enough, it’s even grander than the destiny the Takers dreamed up for us. It should be noted that what is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.

by Ayn Rand

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.