Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

“I’m seventeen and I’m crazy. My uncle says the two always go together.” (Pg 7)

“People were more often 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?” (Pg 11)

“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’re going.” (Pg 30)

“We need not 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.” (Pg 52)

“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.” (Pg 58)

“I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.” (Pg 82)

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magival 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.” (Pg 82-83)

“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.” (Pg 83)

“That’s the good part of dying; when you’ve nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.” (Pg 85)

“The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for…are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.” (Pg 86)

“Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for sure.” (Pg 86)

“What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.” (Pg 107)

“We all have our harps to play. And it’s up to you now to know with which ear you’ll llisten.” (Pg 108)

“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.” (Pg 115)

“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.” (Pg 153)

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 the doing.” (Pg 153)

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies.” (Pg 156)

“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.” (Pg 156-157)

“See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” (Pg 157)