Fahrenheit 451

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.

Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark.

But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello, and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the phoenix-disc on his chest, he spoke again.

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact.

My uncle was arrested another time-did I tell you?-for being a pedestrian.

“What?” asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience.

“What?” asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience.

People were more often-he searched for a simile, found one in his work-torches, blazing away until they whiffed out.

It was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon had set.

The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached.

And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with the eyes of puff-adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out the door.

Montag moved back to his own house, left the window wide, checked Mildred, tucked the covers about her carefully, and then lay down with the moonlight on his cheek-bones and on the frowning ridges in his brow, with the moonlight distilled in each eye to form a silver cataract there.

He tried to conjure up a face to fit the words, but there was no face.

At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first.

It growled again, a strange rasping combination of electrical sizzle, a frying sound, a scraping of metal, a turning of cogs that seemed rusty and ancient with suspicion.

Were all firemen picked then for their looks as well as their proclivities?

Beatty, Stoneman, and Black ran up the sidewalk, suddenly odious and fat in the plump fireproof slickers.

He slapped her face with amazing objectivity and repeated the question.

A fountain of books sprang down upon Montag as he climbed shuddering up the sheer stair-well.

His hands were ravenous.

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 patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

He tried to count how many times she swallowed and he thought of the visit from the two zinc-oxide-faced men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths and the electronic-eyed snake winding down into the layer upon layer of night and stone and stagnant spring water, and he wanted to call out to her, how many have you taken TONIGHT! the capsules! how many will you take later and not know? and so on, every hour! or maybe not tonight, tomorrow night!

You drowned in music and pure cacophony.

A child feigning illness, afraid to call because after a moment's discussion, the conversation would run so: “Yes, Captain, I feel better already."

There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!

Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams.

Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide?rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.

I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration.

Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world.