If you've ever read
Fahrenheit 451, then this list of quotes, in order, makes a pretty good summary of Ray Bradbury's novel:
p 5 ...the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered.
p 7 ...face bright as snow in the moonlight,...
p 7 ...two shining drops of bright water...two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact...fragile milk crystal...strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle...
p 7 ...space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them.
p 9 My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days.
p 9-10 My uncle was arrested another time--did I tell you?--for being a pedestrian.
p 17 ...their laughter was relaxed and hearty and not forced in any way...
p 17 How are you supposed to root for the home team when you don't even have a program or know the names?
p 18 I don't know anything any more.
p 18 She was an expert at lip reading from ten years of apprenticeship at Seashell ear thimbles.
p 20 What's the play about? I just told you. There are these people named Rob and Ruth and Helen.
p 27 Why? You got a guilty conscience about something?
p 29 It's just I haven't had time--
p 29 But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you?
p 29 more sports
p 30 They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park and bully people around...
p 31 People don't talk about anything ... They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and nobody says anything different from anyone else ... the same jokes most of the time...
p 33 Any man's insane who thinks he can fool the government...
p 36 ...swinging silver hatchets at doors that were, after all, unlocked...
p 36 You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only
things.
p 39 ...her quietness a condemnation...
p 40 You've gone right by the corner where we turn for the firehouse.
p 43 Funny, how funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband'r wife.
p 44 ...a silly empty man, near a silly empty woman, ... How do you get so empty?
p 44 ...said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.
p 49 What was on? Programs. What programs? Some of the best ever. Who? Oh, you know, the bunch.
p 49 We burnt an old woman with her books ... It's a good thing the rug's washable.
p 51 There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house...She was simple-minded.
p 56 The zipper replaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
p 57 More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere.
p 57 Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs,...
p 57 The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy...
p 58 It didn't come from the Government down...
p 58 ...you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.
p 58 With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
p 58 ...then all are happy...
p 58-59 ...[firemen] were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind...official censors, judges, and executors.
p 59 People want to be happy
p 60 The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle.
p 61 If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
p 61 If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that let people worry over it.
p 61 Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information ... Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
p 63 ...there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn't want to talk.
p 63 The real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong
kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.
p 65 Happiness is important. Fun is everything. And yet...I'm not happy.
p 66 We've got to start somewhere here, figuring out why we're in such a mess, you and the medicine nights, and the car, and me and my work. We're heading right for the cliff, Millie, God, I don't want to go over.
p 67 And men like Beatty are afraid of her. I can't understand it.
p 71 ...the cold November rain fell...
p 73 Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are?
p 74 Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?
p 76-77 ...all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.
p 79 Denham's Dentifrice, Denham's Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham's Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice,...
p 82 ...you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty',...
p 82 Nobody listens any more. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at
me. I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the
walls.
p 82 We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.
p 82 It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in the books. The same things
could be in the 'parlor families' today.
p 83 The magic is only in what the books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
p 84 Leisure. Oh, but we have plenty of off-hours. Off-hours, yes. But time to think?
p 84 The televisor is 'real'...It tells me what to think and blasts it in. It
must be right. It
seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest...It
becomes and
is the truth.
p 84-85 Number one...: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.
p 86 ...when we
had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off.
p 87 Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.
p 89 I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one
wanted them back.
p 89 Those who don't build must burn.
p 92 I don't want to change sides and just be
told what to do. There's no reason to change if I do that. ... You're wise already.
p 96-97 Let's talk politics ... President Noble. I think he's one of the nicest-looking men ever became president. Oh, but the man they ran against him! ... small and homely and he didn't shave too close or comb his hair very well ... little short man like that ... mumbled ... Fat ... No wonder the landslide was for Winston Noble.
p 99
Dover Beach
p 101 I've always said poetry and tears, poetry and suicide and crying and awful feelings, poetry and sickness;
all that mush!
p 101 Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words ... Why
do people want to hurt people?
p 101 Let's laugh and be happy now, stop crying, we'll have a party!
p 103 ... you were so recently
of them yourself. They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won't run on.
p 107 What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you.
p 108 ... the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.
p 109 Here we go to keep the world happy ...
p 113 Old Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's burnt his wings, he wonders why.
p 114 She didn't do anything to anyone. She just left them alone.
p 114 Alone, hell! She chewed around you, didn't she? One of those damn do-gooders with their shocked, holier-than-thou silences, their one talent making others feel guilty.
p 115 What is fire? ... Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibilities and consequences.
p 115 Now, Montag, you're a burden.
p 116 ... he had lived here in this empty house with a strange woman who would forget him tomorrow, who had gone and quite forgotten him already, listening to her Seashell Radio ...
p 118 Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation.
p 121 ... don't face a problem, burn it.
p 122
Beatty wanted to die.
p 123 ... burn them or they'll burn you, ...
p 124 [the highway at night] seemed like a boatless river frozen there in the raw light of the high white arc lamps;
p 124 [a gas station at night] a great chunk of porcelain snow shining there, ...
p 125 The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the gray head off a dry dandelion flower.
p 125 "War has been declared."
p 128 A carful of children ... had seen a man, a very extraordinary sight, a man strolling, a rarity, and simply said, "Let's get him," ...
p 128 For no reason at all in the world they would have killed me.
p 132 Even though practically everything's airborne these days and most of the tracks are abandoned, the rails are still there, rusting.
p 133 Tonight, this network is proud to have the opportunity to follow the Hound by camera helicopter as it starts on its way to the target--
p 139 ...thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys, and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like gray animals peering from electric caves, faces with gray colorless eyes, gray tongues, and gray thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face.
p 140 He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
p 141 The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time.
p 142 ... a strange fire because it meant something different to him. It was not burning. It was
warming.
p 143 He had never thought in his life that it could give as well as take.
p 148 Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, ... the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy.
p 152 Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It's not pleasant, but then we're not in control, we're the odd minority crying in the wilderness.
p 153 But you can't
make people listen. They have to come 'round in their own time...
p 153 The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we mustn't be pendants; we were no to feel superior to anyone else in the world.
p 154 ... until another Dark Age.
p 154 But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and
worth the doing.
p 158 And the war began and ended in that instant.
p 158 ...yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions, and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders it few precious memories and, puzzled, dies.
p 163 There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man.
p 165 To everything there is a season. [Ecclesiastes 3:1] Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
Reference
Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. 50th Anniversary Edition. 1953,1979,1981,1982. Del Rey.
Ted Bogart, "Fahrenheit 451 and 1984", Book Block, 2012, web.
