Quotes

1. If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

-Quotation of Juan Ramón Jiménez, used as an epigraph on the cover page.

Explanation: Normality is defined by dominant social tendencies. While conformity may be useful to maintain order, it can also stifle freedom. The quotation says that if society asks us to toe a definite line, we ought to defy it by moving in the opposite direction.

This line was used as the subtitle on the cover of the novel to stress the need for reflection and defiance of status-quo. It makes it clear that an uncritical adherence to societal norms can be harmful at personal and collective levels.

2. “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.” (83) (Beatty)

Explanation: Beatty personifies books, and says to Montag that they are deceptive and can even turn against us. He adds that texts are used in a biased manner to uphold dominant narratives. A text can be employed selectively to uphold or dismiss an argument. Holy books have been used for centuries to promote harmony among people or to bring about disaffection. Readers can feel lost in a confused mass of words.

3. “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. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles per hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn’t that funny, and sad, too?” (p. 9) (Clarissa)

Explanation: When Montag meets Clarissa for the first time, she tells him that a fast-paced life prevents people from savoring the delights offered by nature. Since people are always in a hurry, everything is hazy for them. Galloping toward an uncertain future, they restrict themselves to ephemeral pleasures. Bradbury describes a time when cautious drivers and pedestrians were regarded as deviant, and were imprisoned, executed or subjected to psychiatric assessment.

4. “The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisions, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.“ (82) (Faber)

Explanation: Montag thought that books contained irresistible and Faber said it lay somewhere else. It is something that words fail to capture, but is original, natural and not spoilt by technology. It has child-like innocence, spontaneity, cheer and truth. It is antithetical to television and the internet. In short, it is a dialogue with life.

5. “Everyone must leave something in the room or left behind when he dies, my grandfather said. 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’re there. 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.“ (156-157) (Granger)

Explanation: When Montag admits before a group of exiles that he cannot remember anything substantial done by his wife, one of the exiles named Granger says that a life worthy of being remembered is one which leaves behind something positive. He says that one who destroys something eliminates it from the world and makes the world worse than it was before. Contrarily, one who builds something leaves it behind eternally. Even a seemingly insignificant impression of someone on their grandchild is valuable as it will be passed on to others. This is similar to a lawnmower who cuts grass and does one’s job, but a gardener who tends plants is remembered for the beautiful flowers they helped grow.

Additional Quotes:

6. “Grandfather’s been dead for all those years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you’d find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me.” (ibid.)

7. “[Grandfather] was a sculptor. ‘I hate a Roman named Status Quo!’ he said to me. ‘Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask 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,’ he said, ‘shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'” (157-158)

8. “I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it’ll all gather together inside and it’ll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it’s finally me, where it’s in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day.“ (155-156)

9. “There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them.” (156)