Fahrenheit 451 fire quotes help us understand a powerful and recurring symbol throughout the novel.
From the burning of books to the destruction of entire homes, fire represents destruction and rebirth.
In this blog post, we will explore some of the most memorable fire quotes from Fahrenheit 451, with page numbers from the 60th Anniversary Edition.
Fahrenheit 451 Quotes With Page Numbers
Fahrenheit 451 Fire Quotes Part 1: The Hearth and the Salamander
“It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Montag thoughts as the narrator), Page 1
“Kerosene,” he said, because the silence had lengthened, “is nothing but perfume to me.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire, (Character: Guy Montag), Page 4
“Do you ever read any of the books you burn?”
He laughed. “That’s against the law!”
“Oh. Of course.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Characters: Clarisse McClellan and Guy Montag), Pages 5, 6
“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Characters: Guy Montag), Page 6
“They walked still farther and the girl said, “Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?”
No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it.”
Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Characters: Clarisse McClellan and Guy Montag), Page 6
“How inconvenient! 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 really couldn’t 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. Everything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who’s got a match!”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Montag thoughts as the narrator), Page 35
“The sight of it rushed the men out and down away from the house. Captain Beatty, keeping his dignity, backed slowly through the front door, his pink face burnt and shiny from a thousand fires and night excitements. God, thought Montag, how true! Always at night the alarm comes. Never by day! Is it because the fire is prettier by night? More spectacle, a better show? The pink face of Beatty now showed the faintest panic in the door. The woman’s hand twitched on the single matchstick. The fumes of kerosene bloomed up about her.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag), Pages 36, 37
“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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, knowledge (Character: Guy Montag), Page 48
“Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before…
It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it’s all over.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag), Page 49
“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 against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 56
“Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 57
“Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 57
“Then if what the Captain says is true, we’ll burn them together, believe me, we’ll burn them together.
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag), Page 63
Fahrenheit 451 Quotes About Fire Part 2: The Sieve and the Sand
“The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag), Page 78
“And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Faber), Page 78
“To see the firehouses burn across the land, destroyed as hotbeds of treason.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Faber), Page 82
“Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Faber), Page 85
Fahrenheit 451 Quotes About Technology
Quotes From Fahrenheit 451 About Fire, Part 3: Burning Bright
“Don’t haggle and nag them; you were so recently of them yourself. They are so confident that they will run on for ever. But they won’t run on. They don’t know that this is 100 all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it’ll have to hit. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Faber), Pages 99, 100
“What is it about fire that’s so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?…The thing man wanted to invent, but never did…If you let it go on, it’d burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledygook about friction and molecules. But they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Captain Beatty) Page 109
“Now, Montag, you’re a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Captain Beatty) Page 109
“And as before, it was good to burn, he felt himself gush out in the fire, snatch, rend, rip in half with flame, and put away the senseless problem.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag as the narrator), Page 110
“We never burned right…”
“Hand it over, Guy,” said Beatty with a fixed smile.
And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering mannikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him. There was a hiss like a great mouthful of spittle banging a red-hot stove, a bubbling and frothing as if salt had been poured over a monstrous black snail to cause a terrible liquefaction and a boiling over of yellow foam. Montag shut his eyes, shouted, shouted, and fought to get his hands at his ears to clamp and to cut away the sound. Beatty flopped over and over and over, and at last twisted in on himself like a charred wax doll and lay silent.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Characters: Guy Montag and Captain Beatty) Page 113
“You always said, don’t face a problem, burn it.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag), Page 115
“If we have to burn, let’s take a few more with us.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag as the narrator), Page 115
“You must remember, burn them or they’ll burn you, he thought.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag as the narrator), Page 115
“Then he stood in the cold night air, waiting, and at a distance he heard the fire sirens start up and run, and the Salamanders coming, coming to burn Mr. Black’s house while he was away at work, to make his wife stand shivering in the morning air while the roof let go and dropped in upon the fire, But now, she was still asleep.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: The narrator about Montag), Pages 123-24
“When I leave, burn the spread of this bed that I touched.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag), Page 129
“The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burned things with the firemen and the sun burned Time, that meant that everything burned!”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Montag’s thougths as the narrator), Page 134
“After a long time of floating on the land and a short time of floating in the river he knew why he must never burn again in his life.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: The narrator), Page 134
“I struck a fireman when he came to burn my library years ago.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Granger), Page 143
“Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Guy Montag as the narrator), Page 147-48
“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 the 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’re got on 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 have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the … funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about fire (Character: Granger), Page 156
What quotes in Fahrenheit 451 talk about burning books?
“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about burning books (Guy Montag), Page 6
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about burning books (Captain Beatty), Page 56
“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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about burning books, knowledge (Guy Montag), Page 48
“The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about burning books (Guy Montag), Page 78
“And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about burning books (Faber), Page 78
Fahrenheit 451 fire symbolism
Fire is an essential symbol in Fahrenheit 451, representing destruction, rebirth, and knowledge. The government uses fire to control society, burn books, and censor knowledge. As Montag is a firefighter, he is responsible for igniting fires rather than extinguishing them.
Bradbury writes, “It was a pleasure to burn” (page 1) to show the firemen’s initial satisfaction in their work.
Society has become numb to reality due to the promotion of technology and propaganda. Technology allows the government to change the meaning of things. Books can’t be changed easily, so they burn them. Without books, no one learns from history.
For example, Montag repeats a lie he’s heard his whole life. “Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?”
No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it.” (Page 6)
Without asking elders or reading forbidden books, Montag relies on what the government tells him.
Bradbury writes, “Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.” (Page 6) This quote shows how the government uses fire to manipulate and censor knowledge.
But Montag’s exposure to books causes him to question his life and ultimately transforms him from a conformist drone to a rebel and a leader.
As Montag realizes the importance of books, he says, “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” (page 48).
Montag uses fire to rebel against oppression and destroy memories of being married to Mildred. “When I leave, burn the spread of this bed that I touched.” (Page 129)
He also uses fire to kill Captain Beatty and the mechanical hound.
Bradbury writes, “And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering mannikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him.” (Page 113) This quote shows how Montag used fire to fight against the government’s oppression.
In conclusion, fire is an important symbol in Fahrenheit 451, representing destruction and rebirth and how knowledge can be controlled or used to break free from oppression.
What are some quotes in Fahrenheit 451 about burning houses?
“They walked still farther and the girl said, “Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?”
No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it.”
Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about burning houses (Clarisse McClellan and Guy Montag), Page 6
“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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about burning houses (Guy Montag), Page 48
“Then he stood in the cold night air, waiting, and at a distance he heard the fire sirens start up and run, and the Salamanders coming, coming to burn Mr. Black’s house while he was away at work, to make his wife stand shivering in the morning air while the roof let go and dropped in upon the fire, But now, she was still asleep.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about burning books (The narrator), Pages 123-24
How does Montag describe the fire?
At the novel’s beginning, Montag describes the fire as something he enjoys watching that blackens and changes things; however, as he starts to question the events and occurrences around him, the connotation of the symbol of fire shifts from destructive to a more neutral approach.