Which book would you save?

Quotes from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

What did you underline, highlight or scribble in the margins of Ray Bradbury's book? (your page number might be different depending on which edition you have).

Add your favorite quotes and discuss them here!

And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of and unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death... -pg 44

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We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves agains. -pg 58

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She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. -pg 60

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Cram them full of noncombustable data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' wit information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. -pg 61

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We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. -pg 62

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"'It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.' " -pg 68

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"'We cannot tell the precise moment when a friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.'" -pg 71

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We've started and won two atomic wars since 1990! 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? I've hear rumors; the world is starving, but we're all 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? I don't, thats sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! -pg 74

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It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books...

Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garmment for us. -pg 83

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The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones rin a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. -pg 83

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"' The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's

shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.' "

...

"'Ah, love let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreamse,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and

flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.'"

-pg 100

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"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way your soul has somwhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. -pg 157

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We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. and while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll al gather together inside and it'll be me. -pg 162

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"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. 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. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always hae it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation. -pg 163

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