Fiona’s Reviews > Fahrenheit 451 > Status Update

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.

‘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 you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something

‘Where do we go from here? Would books help us?’
‘Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. 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 I hardly think a very old man and a fireman turned sour could do much this late in the game . . .’

‘Oh, but we have plenty of off-hours.’
Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall televisor. Why? The televisor is “real”. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in.

Do you know why books such as this are 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.

'always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally "bright", did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.

whose sole knowledge as I say, of Hamlet was one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.'

'Classics cut to fit fifteen-minutes radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour to you, Mrs Montag)

'When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where, when? Well, I'd say it rally got started around about a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule-book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn't get along well until photography come into its own. then - motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.'

‘It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ‘ em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.’

They walked still further and the girl said, ‘Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?