F451 quotes Flashcards
“Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
Beatty
“I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this.”
Clarisse
“Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”
Faber
“Any man’s instance who thinks he can fool the government and us.”
Beatty
“Are you happy?”
Clarisse
“At least once in his career, every fireman gets an itch. What do the books say, he wonders. Oh, to scratch that itch, eh?”
Beatty
“Bet I know something else you don’t. There’s dew on the grass in the morning… And if you look… there’s a man in the moon.”
Clarisse
“Christ is one of the ‘family’ now. I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He’s a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine when he isn’t making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.”
Faber
“Clarisse McClellan? We’ve a record on her family. We’ve watched them carefully. Heredity and environment are funny things. You can’t rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years.”
Beatty
“Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth? But when he was held, rootless, in mid air by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn’t something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane. Well, there we have the first things I said we needed. Quality, texture of information.”
Faber
“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores.”
Faber
“I don’t know what it is. I’m so damned unhappy, I’m so mad, and I don’t know why I feel like I’m putting on weight.”
Montag
“I don’t know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d seen burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.”
Montag
“I don’t talk things, sir…I talk the meaning of things. I sit her and know I’m alive.”
Faber
“I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself”
Faber
“i’ve had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing!”
Beatty
“If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him the one. Batter yet, give him none.”
Beatty
“I’m afraid of children my own age. They kill each other… Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I’m afraid of them and they don’t like me because I’m afraid.”
Clarisse
“I’m seventeen and I’m crazy.”
Clarisse
“I’m the Queen Bee, safe in the hive. You will be the drone, the traveling ear.”
Faber
“It was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he’s the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them.”
Beatty
“It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ‘em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”
Montag
“I’ve heard rumors; the world in starving, but we’re well-fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why?”
Montag
“Let the war turn off the ‘families.’ Our civilization is flinging itself into pieces. Stand backk from the centrifuge.”
Faber
“Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
Montag
“Millie, does – Does your ‘family’ love you, love you very much, love you with all their heart and soul, Millie?”
Montag
“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn them to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”
Montag
“Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing.”
Faber
“Kerosene is nothing but perfume to me.”
Montag
“Nobody listens anymore. 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. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it’ll make sense.”
Montag
“Now, my ‘family’ is people. They mean things; I laugh, they laugh!”
Mildred
“Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
Beatty, Old Woman
“Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it’s a smaller slideshow indeed…”
Beatty
“So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, pore less, hairless, expressionless.”
Faber
“That’s my family.”
Mildred
“The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caesar thou art mortal””
Faber
“The good writers touch life often. the mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
Faber
“The important thing for you to remember…is we’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others.”
Beatty
“The most important single things we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important…We’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.”
Granger
“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
Montag
“There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did.”
Granger
“We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing.”
Montag
“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.”
Beatty
“We’re going to build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”
Granger
“We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask use what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And someday we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest gosh dang steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time to shove war in it and cover it up.”
Granger
“You can’t ever have my books”
old woman
“You know the law…Where’s your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel.”
Beatty
“You’re not like the others … When I talk, you look at me … The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You’re one of the few who put up with me.”
Clarisse
“Now you did it. Old Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he’s burnt his damn wings, he wonders why. Didn’t I hint enough when I sent the Hound around your place?”
Beatty
“We all made the right kind of mistakes, or we wouldn’t be here. When we were separate individuals, all we had was rage. I struck a fireman when he came to burn my library years ago. I’ve been running ever since.”
Granger
“We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”
Granger
“We’re book burners too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they’d be found.”
Granger
“If you love me at all you’ll put up with this, twenty-four, forty-eight hours, that’s all I ask, then it’ll be over. I promise, I swear! And if there is something here, just one little thing out of a whole mess of things, maybe we can pass it on to someone else.”
Montag
Professor Faber, I have a rather odd question to ask. How many copies of the Bible are left in this country?”
Montag
“Who can stop me? I’m a fireman. I can burn you!”
Montag
Go home … Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions you’ve had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it? Go home, go home! Before I knock you down and kick you out of the door!”
Montag
“It’ll be even more fun when we can afford to have the fourth wall installed. How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in? It’s only two thousand dollars.”
Mildred
“McClellan. McClellan, Run over by a car. Four days ago. I’m not sure. But I think she’s dead. The family moved out anyway. I don’t know. But I think she’s dead.”
Mildred
“See what you’re doing? You’ll ruin us! Who’s more important, me or that Bible?”
Mildred
“Poor family, poor family, oh everything gone, everything, everything gone now ….”
Mildred
“Go to the firehouse when it’s time. I’ll be with you. Let’s listen to this Captain Beatty together. He could be one of us. God knows. I’ll give you things to say. We’ll give him a good show. Do you hate me for this electronic cowardice of mine?”
Faber
“Would you like me to read? I’ll read so you can remember. I go to bed only five hours a night. Nothing to do. So if you like; I’ll read you to sleep nights. They say you retain knowledge even when you’re sleeping, if someone whispers it in your ear.”
Faber
“I’ve heard there are still hobo camps all across the country, here and there; walking camps … they say there’s lots of old Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los Angeles. Most of them are wanted and hunted in the cities.”
Faber
