Fahrenheit 451 Quotes With Page Numbers
Note: Quotes are sourced from the 60th Anniversary Edition of “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury.
Part 1: The Hearth and the Salamander
In this opening section, Ray Bradbury introduces a world where firemen ignite rather than extinguish, and thought is drowned by speed and screens. These quotes from Part 1 capture Montag’s initial numbness, Clarisse’s awakening influence, and the society’s hollow core. Below, they’re grouped by theme to highlight the dystopia’s layers.
The Allure of Fire
Fire is more than a tool for Montag—it’s a seductive force, a symphony of destruction that defines his existence. These quotes reveal his early fascination and the power he wields.
“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, books, (Character: Guy Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 1
Further Reading: Fahrenheit 451 Quotes About Books
“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
“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, censorship, ignorance (Characters: 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 censorship, ignorance, fire (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 35
Curiosity and Awakening
Clarisse McClellan enters Montag’s life like a candle in the dark, sparking questions he’s never dared to ask. These quotes showcase her quirky clarity and the unease she stirs in him.
“I’m seventeen and I’m crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, humor, (Character: Clarisse McClellan), Page 5
“One time, as a child in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon…”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: knowledge (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 5
“Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but—what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about Clarisse McClellan (Characters: Guy Montag as the narrator), Page 5
“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 books, fire, censorship, ignorance (Characters: Clarisse McClellan and Guy Montag), Pages 5, 6
“He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often–he searched for a simile, found one in his work–torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people’s faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 8
“He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 9
“She didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why…. Luckily, queer ones like her don’t happen often.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: ignorance, society (Character: Captain Beatty), Pages 57, 58
Society’s Emptiness
Bradbury paints a world racing past meaning, where people are numbed by speed and shallow distractions. These quotes expose the hollowness beneath the bustle.
“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, ignorance (Characters: Clarisse McClellan and Guy Montag), Page 6
“Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevards…? I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly…If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance (Character: Clarisse McClellan), Page 6
“There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 14
“He said hello and then said, “What are you up to now?”
“I’m still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.
“I don’t think I’d like that,” he said.
“You might if you tried.”
“I never have.”
She licked her lips. “Rain even tastes good.”
“What do you do, go around trying everything once?” he asked.
“Sometimes twice.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Clarisse McClellan and Guy Montag), Page 19
“They want to know what I do with my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won’t tell them what. I’ve got them running. And sometimes, I tell them, I like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall in my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Clarisse McClellan), Page 20
“You’re not like the others. I’ve seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. 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. That’s why I think it’s so strange you’re a fireman, it just doesn’t seem right for you, somehow.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance (Character: Clarisse McClellan), Page 21
“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, love (Characters: Guy Montag and Clarisse McClellan), Page 26
“Why aren’t you in school? I see you every day wandering around.”
“Oh, they don’t miss me,” she said. “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.” She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. “Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. 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 to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing ‘chicken’ and ‘knock hubcaps.’ I guess I’m everything they say I am, all right. I haven’t any friends. That’s supposed to prove I’m abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, censorship, ignorance (Characters: Guy Montag and Clarisse McClellan), Page 27
“But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going. Sometimes I even go to Fun parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don’t care as long as they’re insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone’s happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what? People don’t talk about anything.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance (Character: Clarisse McClellan), Page 28
“And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: technology, society, ignorance (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 41
“And me not sleeping tonight or tomorrow night or any night for a long while, now that this has started. And he thought of her lying on the bed with the two technicians standing straight over her, not bent with concern, but only standing straight, arms folded. And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an 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, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty.
How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn’t it? ‘What a shame! You’re not in love with anyone!’ And why not?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 41
“No front porches. My uncle says 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. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; 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. So they ran off with the porches.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: censorship, society (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 60
Censorship and the Power of Books
In this world, books are outlawed, and knowledge is torched to keep minds blank. These quotes reveal the mechanics of censorship and the quiet rebellion it sparks.
“They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again: “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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 33
“You can’t ever have my books.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: books (Character: the old woman who refused to give up her books), Page 35
“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 books, fire, knowledge, censorship (Character: Guy Montag), Page 49
“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?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance (Character: Guy Montag), Page 49
“Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple the population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, censorship (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 51
“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.” “Snap ending.” Mildred nodded. “Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.” Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down. Beatty ignored her and continued: “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and jump again as she patted his pillow. Right now she was pulling at his shoulder to try to get him to move so she could take the pillow out and fix it nicely and put it back. And perhaps cry out and stare or simply reach down her hand and say, “What’s this?” and hold up the hidden book with touching innocence. “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, knowledge, censorship, ignorance (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 52
“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: ignorance (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 53
“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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, society, ignorance (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 54
“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. 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, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: books, censorship, society (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 55
“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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 55
“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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance, censorship (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 55
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door…Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, censorship (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 56
“[Firemen] were given a new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, censorship (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 books, fire, censorship (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 57
“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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, censorship (Character: Captain Beatty), Page 57
Technology’s Grip
Machines and media dominate this society, lulling minds into submission. These quotes highlight the mechanical hum drowning out humanity.
“It was like a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: technology (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 22
“It doesn’t think anything we don’t want it to think.’
‘That’s sad,’ said Montag, quietly, ‘because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that’s all it can ever know.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: technology, ignorance (Characters: Captain Beatty and Guy Montag), Page 25
Part 2: The Sieve and the Sand
“We cannot tell the precise moment when 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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: love (Character: Montag reading a passage), Page 67
“How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 2022! 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 heard rumors; the world is 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? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, knowledge, ignorance, society (Character: Montag), Page 70
“I don’t talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: knowledge (Character: Faber), Page 71
Professor Faber Quotes And Page Numbers
“If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: books, knowledge (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 74
“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 regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine – when he isn’t making veiled references to certain commercial products that ever worshiper absolutely needs.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance, religion (Character: Faber), Page 77
“Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am 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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society (Character: Faber), Page 78
“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. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, technology (Character: Montag), Page 78
“You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No, no it’s not books at all you’re looking for! 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 or 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. Of course you couldn’t know this, of course you still can’t understand what I mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that’s what counts.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, knowledge (Character: Faber), Pages 78, 79
“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. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. 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 run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books (Character: Faber), Page 79
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, knowledge (Character: Professor Faber), Page 79
“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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: books (Character: Faber), Page 79
“So now do 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, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, society, ignorance, censorship (Character: Faber), Page 79
“That’s the good part of dying; when you’ve nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Guy Montag), Page 81
“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They’re Caeser’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal.” Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, knowledge (Character: Faber), Page 82
“Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society (Character: Faber), Page 84
“Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: fire, ignorance (Character: Faber), Page 85
“I don’t want to change sides and just be told what to do. There’s no reason to change if I do that.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Montag), Page 88
“How’re your children, Mrs. Phelps?’ he asked.
‘You know I haven’t any! No one in his right mind, the good Lord knows, would have children!’ said Mrs. Phelps, not quite sure why she was angry with this man.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Mrs. Bowles. ‘I’ve had TWO children by Caesarian section. No use going through all that agony for a baby. The world must reproduce, you know, the race must go on. Besides, they sometimes look just like you, and that’s nice. Two Caesarians turned the trick, yes, sir. Oh, my doctor said, Caesarians aren’t necessary; you’ve got the hips for it, everything’s normal, but I INSISTED.’
‘Caesarians or not, children are ruinous; you’re out of your mind,’ said Mrs. Phelps.
‘I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. I put up with them when they come home three days a month; it’s not bad at all. You heave them into the ‘parlor’ and turn the switch. It’s like washing clothes: stuff laundry in and slam the lid.’ Mrs. Bowles tittered. ‘They’d just as soon kick as kiss me. Thank God, I can kick back!”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: technology, society, ignorance (Characters: Montag, Mrs. Phelps, and Mrs. Bowles), Pages 92, 93
“If there were no war, if there was peace in the world, I’d say fine, have fun! But, Montag, you mustn’t go back to being just a fireman. All isn’t well with the world.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society (Character: Faber), Page 100
“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: ignorance, knowledge (Character: Faber), Page 100
“But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: censorship, ignorance, society (Character: Faber), Page 104
“Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it’s up to you to know with which ear you’ll listen.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society (Character: Faber), Page 104
Part 3: Burning Bright
“This is happening to me,” said Montag.
“What a dreadful surprise,” said Beatty. “For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are. But let’s not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up with you, it’s too late, isn’t it, Montag?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society (Characters: Montag and Captain Beatty), Pages 109, 110
“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
“At least you were a fool about the right things,” said Faber.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: ignorance (Character: Faber) Page 124
“The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 133
“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, thoughts told by narrator), Page 134
“Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law. Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it’s here. And the hour’s late. And the war’s begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors… All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need intact and safe. We’re not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good… 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. When the war’s over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: knowledge, society (Character: Granger), Page 145
“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about: society, ignorance (Character: Granger), Page 146
“The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we musn’t be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, (Character: Granger), Page 146
“And when the war’s over, someday, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. 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 doing.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, (Character: Granger), Pages 146, 147
“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, (Someone said at the camp near the end), Page 148
“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (character: Granger), Page 149
“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 so your soul has somewhere 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. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, (character: Granger), Pages 149,150
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (character: Granger), Page 150
“It doesn’t matter what you do…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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (character: Granger), Page 150
“Montag, falling flat, going down, saw or felt, or imagined he saw or felt the walls go dark in Millie’s face, heard her screaming, because in the millionth part of time left, she saw her own face reflected there, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, and it was such a wildly empty face, all by itself in the room, touching nothing, starved and eating of itself, that at last she recognized it was her own…”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 152
“I’ll hold on to the world tight some day. I’ve got one finger on it now; that’s a beginning.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 155
“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, knowledge (Character: Granger), Page 156
“Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. 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 us what we’re doing, you can say, ‘We’re remembering’. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And some day we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest … steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about books, knowledge (Character: Granger), Page 157
“To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Character: Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 158
“And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. Yes, thought Montag, that’s the one I’ll save for noon. For noon… When we reach the city.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (Montag, thoughts told by narrator), Page 158
The last quote in the book.
Compiled by Jeremy Mortis, a book enthusiast exploring timeless quotes.
Citation for This Source:
MLA
Mortis, Jeremy. “Fahrenheit 451 Quotes With Page Numbers.” Ageless Investing, 28 Mar. 2022, https://agelessinvesting.com/fahrenheit-451-quotes-with-page-numbers/. Accessed [insert reader’s access date].
APA