What is it about fire that’s so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it? It’s perpetual motion, the one thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it’d burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It’s a mystery. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.
— Captain Beatty to Montag, Chapter Three of Farenheit 451
