Fahrenheit 451: Who Said That?
" ... [T]he word 'intellectual', of course, became the swear word it deserved to be." 55
Beatty
"Clarisse McClellan? We've a record on her family. We've watched them carefully." 57
Beatty
"There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing." 48
Montag
"We burned a thousand books. We burned a woman." 47
Montag
"My wife's dying. A friend of mine's already dead. Someone who may have been a friend was burnt less than twenty-four hours ago." 77
Montag
"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." 78
Montag
"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!" 52
Beatty
"I want you to do this job all by your lonesome ... Not with kerosene and a match, but piecework, with a flame thrower. Your house, your clean-up." 109
Beatty
"I've read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing." 59
Beatty
"Now you did it. Old Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's burnt his d@#$ wings, he wonders why." 107
Beatty
"Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more." 52
Beatty
"Read a few lines and off you go over the cliff." 102
Beatty
"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!" 52
Beatty
"Welcome back...I hope you'll be staying with us, now that your fever is done and sickness over." 101
Beatty
"When you're quite finished, you're under arrest." 111
Beatty
"Why don't you belch Shakespeare at me, you fumbling snob?...Go ahead now you second-hand literateur, pull the trigger." 113
Beatty
"You got a guilty conscience or something?" 25
Beatty
"You got some [books]?" 31
Beatty
"You know the law. Where's your common sense? None of these books agree with each other." 35
Beatty
" ...[I]t's so strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you." 21
Clarisse
"Are you happy?" 7
Clarisse
"Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning." 7
Clarisse
"Have you ever smelled old leaves? Don't they smell like cinnamon?" 26
Clarisse
"I'm afraid of childen my own age. They kill each other." 27
Clarisse
"People don't talk about anything." 28
Clarisse
"The rain feels good. I love to walk in it ... Rain even tastes good." 19
Clarisse
"Well, I'm seventeen and I'm crazy." 5
Clarisse
"But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority." 104
Faber
"Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land?" 78
Faber
"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." 79
Faber
"How did you get shaken up? What knocked the torch out of your hands?" 78
Faber
"I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive." 71
Faber
"I feel alive for the first time in years. I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago." 125
Faber
"Let's listen to this Captain Beatty together. He could be one of us." 87
Faber
"All right, you can come out now ... It's all right. You're welcome here." 140
Granger
"Come on now, we're going to build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them." 157
Granger
"Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint." 150
Granger
"I am Plato's Republic." 144
Granger
"They're faking. You threw them off at the river. They can't admit it. They know they can only hold their audience so long. The show's got to have a snap ending, quick!" 141
Granger
"We're book burners, too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they'd be found." 145
Granger
"Welcome back from the dead." 143
Granger
"Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his @#$." 150
Granger's grandfather
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies...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 are there." 149-150
Granger's grandfather
"He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all 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." 148-149
Granger's grandfather
"I hate the Roman named Status Quo!" 150
Granger's grandfather
"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." 150
Granger's grandfather
"See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories." 150
Granger's grandfather
"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds." 150
Granger's grandfather
"The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching...The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime." 150
Granger's grandfather
Original speaker: "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." (Who originally said this before being martyred?) 37
Hugh Latimer
"How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in?" 18
Mildred
"It's fun [to drive fast] out in the country, you hit rabbits, sometimes you hit dogs." 61
Mildred
"Let me fix your pillow." 53
Mildred
"Now my 'family' is people. They tell me things; I laugh, they laugh! And the colors!" 69
Mildred
"Poor family, poor family, oh everything gone, everything, everything gone now ..." 108
Mildred
"That reminds me. Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute romance last night on your wall?" 91
Mildred
"[The woman with the books is] nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books...I hate her." 48
Mildred
"I don't know anything anymore." 15
Montag
"I'm so mad, and I don't know why...I might even start reading books." 62
Montag
"I've tried to imagine just how it would feel. I mean to have firemen burn our houses and our books." 31
Montag
"Kerosene is nothing but perfume to me." 4
Montag
"My God how did this happen? It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know I'm drowning." 124
Montag
"We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively know was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help." 78
Montag
"We've got to start somewhere here, figuring out why we're in such a mess..." 63
Montag
"When I leave, burn the spread of this bed that I touched. Burn the chair in the living room in your wall incinerator. Wipe down the furniture with alcohol, wipe the doorknobs. Burn the throw-rug in the parlor. Turn on the air-conditioning on full in all the rooms and spray moth spray if you have it. Then, turn on your lawn sprinklers as high as they'll go and hose off the sidewalks." 129
Montag
"Why, we've stopped in front of my house." 106
Montag
"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 just heave them into the 'parlor' and turn on the switch. It's like washing clothes; stuff the laundry in and slam the lid." 92-93
Mrs. Bowles
"Look, we gotta go. Just had another call on the old ear-thimble. Ten blocks from here. Someone else just jumped off the cap of a pillbox. Call if you need us again." 13
machine operator
"We get these cases nine or ten a night. Got so many, starting a few years ago, we had the special machines built...You don't need an M.D., case like this; all you need is two handymen, clean up the problem in half an hour." 13
machine operator
Person who quoted: "'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.'" 33
the old woman
