“To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)Is agony immobilized. While Time,The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.”

“while time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world”

“If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.”

“Well, Montag, take my word for it, I've had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about non-existent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're non-fiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost.”

“Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.”

“Pessimism is a luxury of good times. In difficult times, pessimism is a self- fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence.”