Fahrenheit 451 Notes 4

73: “Books aren’t people. You read and I look all around, but there isn’t anybody.”

“My ‘family’ is people. The tell me things: I laugh, they laugh! And the colors!”

75: “I don’t talk things, sir,” said Faber. “I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m

alive.”

77: “Does your family love you , love you very much, love you with all their heart and soul,

Millie” . . . “Why’d you ask a silly question like that?”

78: the sieve and the sand

79: Denham’s dentrifice scene

81: “Christ is one of the ‘family’ now . . . when he isn’t making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshipper absolutely needs.”

82: “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 non one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. . . Now it’s too late”

83: “Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. . . . To me it means texture. This book has pores . . . The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch . . . The good writers touch life often.”

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? The 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.”

84: need time to think, leisure

--good that books aren’t “real”, you can turn them off, they don’t consume you “Books can

be beaten down with reason.”

--quality of information, 2)leisure to digest it, 3) right to carry out action based on what we’ve learned

85: Montag learning, says something original

86: books alone won’t save you

87: “it isn’t as simple as just picking up a book you laid down half a century ago. Remember, the

firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”

--“ Patience, Montag. Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to

pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.”

89: “Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”

92: mobilized for war, 10 million mobilized, but say 1 million, it’s happier

--Montag: “I don’t want to change sides and be told what to do. There’s no reason to change if I do that.”