Fahrenheit 451

by Ray Bradbury

He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

You’re not like the others. I’ve seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night.

He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other.

“You’d better run on to your appointment,” he said. And she ran off and left him standing there in the rain. Only after a long time did he move. And then, very slowly, as he walked, he tilted his head back in the rain, for just a few moments, and opened his mouth. . . .

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.

So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next...

Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I ...

And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no lon...

They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and ...

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred.

“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag.

“There was a girl next door,” he said, slowly. “She’s gone now, I think, dead. I can’t even remember her face. But she was different. How—how did she happen?”

Heredity and environment are funny things. You can’t rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.

She didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing.

“Luckily, queer ones like her don’t happen often. We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early.

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.

We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.

Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed.

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave.

An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe

“I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.”

“Professor Faber, I have a rather odd question to ask. How many copies of the Bible are left in this country?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“This is some sort of trap! I can’t talk to just anyone on the phone!” “How many copies of Shakespeare and Plato?” “None! You know as well as I do. None!” Faber hung up.

Then his eyes touched on the book under Montag’s arm and he did not look so old any more and not quite as fragile. Slowly, his fear went. “I’m sorry. One has to be careful.”

“The book—where did you—?” “I stole it.” Faber, for the first time, raised his eyes and looked directly into Montag’s face. “You’re brave.”

“Nobody listens any more. 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. I just want someone to hear what I have to say.

“I don’t know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy.

serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books.

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical 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.

“Number one: 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. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are.

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.

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.

Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth? But when he was held, rootless, in midair, by Hercules, he perished easily.

Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.

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

Montag said, “I’ve been a fool all down the line. I can’t stay long. I’m on my way God knows where.” “At least you were a fool about the right things,” said Faber.

“You did what you had to do. It was coming on for a long time.”

“Yes, I believe that, if there’s nothing else I believe. It saved itself up to happen. I could feel it for a long time, I was saving something up, I went around doing one thing and feeling another. God, it was all there. It’s a wonder it didn’t show on me, like fat.

“I feel alive for the first time in years,” said Faber. “I feel I’m doing what I should’ve done a lifetime ago. For a little while I’m not afraid. Maybe it’s...

A new Mechanical Hound has been brought from another district—” Montag and Faber looked at each other.

“Six, seven, eight!” The doorknobs turned on five thousand doors. “Nine!” He ran out away from the last row of houses, on a slope leading down to a solid moving blackness.

He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

He saw the moon low in the sky now. The moon there, and the light of the moon caused by what? By the sun, of course. And what lights the sun? Its own fire. And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning.

“Everyone must leave something 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