by Ray Bradbury. An excellent classic that I finally read after it kept coming up in conversations. It's been a dystopian year for me since I have read 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, The Giver, and a few others that shout out warnings of how things might be if we're not careful.
I did mark a few passages, mostly for his unique descriptive metaphors and twisted logic.
Clarisse - on why she doesn't go to school - "I'm antisocial they say...I'm very social indeed, it all depends on what you mean by social. Social to me means...talking about how strange the world is...but I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk."
One night at work Montag is horrified when the owner of the books they are meant to burn is still at the residence and refuses to leave. "Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things couldn't really be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Eveything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match!"
Later, discussing the incident with his wife, Millie, she says, "She's nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility, she should've thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing." "You weren't there, you didn't see," He said. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
"Let me alone,"said Mildred. "I didn't do anything."
"Let you alone!...we need not be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while."
"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, like the constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy." (Beatty)
"Heredity and Environment are funny things. You can't rid yourself of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot of what 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." (Beatty)
"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. Let him forget there is such as thing as war...Give the people contests they win by remembering words to popular songs or the names of state capitals...cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. then they'll feel they're thinking." (Beatty)
"I don't talk things, sir, " said Faber. "I talk the meanings of things. I sit here and know I'm alive."
"He could hear Beatty's voice. 'Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second, and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and timeworn philosophies."
"The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great tonload of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run."
"Montag, 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,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself." (Faber)
"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 garment for us." (Faber)
"[Books] have quality...texture, pores...telling detail, fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre one run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies...People need leisure time to think...You can't argue with a four wall tv. Why? The tv is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and it 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."
"My wife says books aren't 'real.'"
"Thank God for that. You can shut them out, say 'hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a tv parlor?. It grows you any shape it wishes!"
"Those who don't build, must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents." (Faber)
"Well," said Beatty, "the crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We're all sheep who have strayed at times."
"But remember, the captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all ahve our harps to play. It's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen."
"All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there."
"You can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened, and why the world blew up under them."
"'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eye with wonder, ' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in 10 seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's life away"
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