Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” Quotes (77 Quotes)

Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you?

Remember, Montag, we're the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.

There are many actors alone who haven't acted Pirandello or Shaw or Shakespeare for years because their plays are too aware of the world. We could use their anger. And we could use the honest rage of those historians who haven't written a line for forty years. True, we might form classes in thinking and reading.

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. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

In the morning he would not have needed sleep, for all the warm odors and sights of a complete country night would have rested and slept him while his eyes were wide and his mouth, when he thought to test it, was half a smile.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

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.

You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead

For your file...in case you decide to be angry with me.

In the silence, our stage whisper might carry.

See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house.

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.

Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevard?...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.

Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?

She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why.... Luckily, queer ones like her don't happen often.

There must me something in books, things we can't imagine.

You're peculiar, you're aggravating, yet you're easy to forgive. You say you're seventeen?..How odd. How strange. And my wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at times. I can't get over it.

He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

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.

So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

He says I'm a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers.

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.

So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.

They read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house.