More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. —Juan Ramón Jiménez
It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.
“Well,” she said, “I’m seventeen and I’m crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.
My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn’t that funny, and sad, too?”
My uncle was arrested another time—did I tell you?—for being a pedestrian. Oh, we’re most peculiar.”
He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. 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.
“We get these cases nine or ten a night.
It’s only two thousand dollars.” “That’s one-third of my yearly pay.”
‘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.’ ”
Beatty rubbed his chin. “A man named Latimer said that to a man named Nicholas Ridley, as they were being burnt alive at Oxford, for heresy, on October 16, 1555.”
he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet.
And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image,
Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”
“Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang, boff, and wow!”
The mind drinks less and less. Impatience.
The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!
Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.
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 executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.”
Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”
Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead.”
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.
Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we’re the Happiness Boys,
We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.
might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life.
I’m so damned unhappy, I’m so mad, and I don’t know why. I feel like I’m putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I’ve been saving up a lot of things, and don’t know what. I might even start reading books.”
Happiness is important. Fun is everything. And yet I kept sitting there saying to myself, I’m not happy, I’m not happy.”
‘We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at least one which makes the heart run over.’ ”
We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 2022!
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave.
Plato reference
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.
And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”
“I voted last election, same as everyone, and I laid it on the line for President Noble. I think he’s one of the nicest looking men ever became president.”
“For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on.
