"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, Part 2: The Sieve and the Sand

And you shrieked, ‘Knowledge is power!’ and ‘A dwarf on a giant's shoulders of the furthest of the two!’ and I summed my side up with rare serenity in, ‘The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us, Mr. Valery once said.’”

It was good listening to the beetle hum, the sleepy mosquito buzz and delicate filigree murmur of the old man's voice at first scolding him and then consoling him in the late hour of night as he emerged from the steaming subway toward the firehouse world.

And you got in and we drove back to the firehouse in beatific silence, all dwindled away to peace.”

“Oh, you were scared silly,” said Beatty, “for I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point!

They leaped into the air and clutched the brass pole as if it were the last vantage point above a tidal wave passing below, and then the brass pole, to their dismay slid them down into darkness, into the blast and cough and suction of the gaseous dragon roaring to life!

“Aren't there professors like yourself, former writers, historians, linguists...?”

“It's an insidious plan, if I do say so myself.”

I must admit that your blind raging invigorated me.

Once as a child he had sat upon a yellow dune by the sea in the middle of the blue and hot summer day, trying to fill a sieve with sand, because some cruel cousin had said, “Fill this sieve and you'll get a dime!”

My cowardice is of such a passion, complementing the revolutionary spirit that lives in its shadow, I was forced to design this.”

If you need help when Beatty pries at you, I'll be sitting right here in your eardrum making notes!”

A minute later, Three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other's limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter.

One anger displacing another.

Montag did not look back at his wife as he went trembling along the hall to the kitchen, where he stood a long time watching the rain hit the windows before he came back down the hall in the grey light, waiting for the tremble to subside.