451 Quotes & Sayings

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. — Ray Bradbury

I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy. — Ray Bradbury

It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. 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. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. — Ray Bradbury

And the people who would burn the words, the people who would take the books from the shelves, the firemen and the ignorant, the ones afraid of tales and words and dreams and Hallowe'en and people who have tattooed themselves with stories and Boys! You Can Grow Mushrooms in Your Cellar! and as long as your words which are people which are days which are my life, as long as your words survive, then you lived and you mattered and you changed the world and I cannot remember your name.

I learned your books. Burned them into my mind. In case the firemen come to town. — Neil Gaiman

If someone tells you what a story is about, they are probably right.
If they tell you that that is all a story is about, they are very definitely wrong. — Neil Gaiman

[U]se extreme caution, and please remember that 451 degrees Fahrenheit is more than just a book a title.... — Ammon Shea

I've only written one science-fiction book: 'Fahrenheit 451.' That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books. — Ray Bradbury

Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand. — David Davis

Well, you seem to have embraced Union propaganda wholeheartedly, Sonmi-451.
And I might observe that you have embraced corpocracy propaganda wholeheartedly, Archivist. — David Mitchell

The fatalism of the limits-to-growth alternative is reasonable only if one ignores all the resources beyond our atmosphere, resources thousands of times greater than we could ever obtain from our beleaguered Earth. As expressed very beautifully in the language of House Concurrent Resolution 451, 'This tiny Earth is not humanity's prison, is not a closed and dwindling resource, but is in fact only part of a vast system rich in opportunities ... ' — Gerard K. O'Neill

The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard, reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montage.
"You can't ever have my books," she said. — Ray Bradbury

Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.] — Isaac Asimov

Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. — Ray Bradbury

How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you? — Ray Bradbury

Archivist: And what if no one believes this truth?
Sonmi~451: Someone already does. — David Mitchell

He felt she was walking in a circle about him, turning him end for end, shaking
him quietly, and emptying his pockets, without once moving herself.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — Ray Bradbury

Don't haggle and nag them; you were so recently of them yourself. They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won't run on. They don't know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it'll have to hit. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it. — Ray Bradbury

Oh, sweet Jesus, English, I'm in love with you! Isn't that reason enough to marry me and put me out of my misery? - Rafael pg 451 — Shirlee Busbee

Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that is about how amazing books are and how amazing the people who write books are. Writers love writing books like this, and for some reason, we let them get away with it. — Josh Lieb

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. — Ray Bradbury

He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge, and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-- quite--touched--bottom--never--never--quite--no not quite--touched bottom... and you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either... never... quite... touched... anything — Ray Bradbury

The Wardens put on their own epic production of Fahrenheit 452," Bob said. "They spent about twenty years finding and destroying copies. — Jim Butcher

After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding
the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge.
And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. Books
are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — Ray Bradbury

I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error. — David Mitchell

I'll be like in that movie, that one where all the people walk around recitin' the books they memorized after all the books were burned. Form a retreat, a cult of over-specialized cold warriors like me. Recite the blue pubs, the yellow pubs, the red pubs, the black pubs. Muttering men keeping the data alive. — James W. Blinn

So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment. — Ray Bradbury

The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don't think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now. — Ray Bradbury

You'd type like hell. I spent $9.80 and in nine days I had Fahrenheit 451. — Ray Bradbury

Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books. — Ray Bradbury

Live as if you'd drop dead in 10 seconds!
- Granger
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury

I can't bury another friend."
"You won't."
"If anything ever happened to you, Rowan-"
"Don't" he breathed. "Don't even say it. We dealt with that enough the other night."
He lifted a hand - hesitated, and then brushed back a strand of hair that had fallen across her face. His callused fingers scrapped against her cheekbone, then caressed the shell of her ear.
It was foolish to even start down that road, when every other man she'd let in had left some wound, in one way or another, accidentally or not.
There was nothing tender in his face. Only a predator's glittering gaze. "When we get back," he said, "remind me to prove you wrong about every thought that just went through your head."
She lifted an eyebrow. "Oh?"
He gave her a sly smile that made thinking impossible. Exactly what he wanted - to distract her from the horrors of tomorrow. "I'll even let you decide how I tell you: with words"- his eyes flickered once to her mouth- "or with my teeth and tongue. — Sarah J. Maas

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. I'll get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold onto the world so tight some day. I've got a finger on it now; that's a beginning. — Ray Bradbury

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! — Ray Bradbury

I don't talk things, sir,' said Faber. 'I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive. — Ray Bradbury

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead ... We're nothing more than dust jackets for books ... so many pages to a person ... — Ray Bradbury

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction. — Ray Bradbury

Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions? — David Mitchell

I had no way to stop . I did not write Fahrenheit 451, it wrote me. — Ray Bradbury

I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. — Ray Bradbury

We're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be. — Ray Bradbury

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. — Ray Bradbury

The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened. — Ray Bradbury

'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen. — Ray Bradbury

By 1950, he had come to view the pedestrian as a threshold or indicator species capable of foretelling things to come - if the rights of the pedestrian were threatened, it would be an early indicator that broader freedoms of thought and action were also at risk. — Jonathan Eller

Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people. — Zack Snyder

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. — Ray Bradbury

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. — Ray Bradbury

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
[Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 467 (1952) (dissenting)] — William O. Douglas

Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now! — Ray Bradbury

right from the start of Fahrenheit 451 everybody on the unit has begun to read. There are often hundreds of books on the set; each member of the unit chooses one, and sometimes you can hear nothing but the sound of turning pages. Wednesday, — Ray Bradbury

On the front porch where she had come to weigh them quietly with her eyes, her quietness a condemnation, the woman stood motionless. — Ray Bradbury

A dinery server behaving like a pureblood attracts trouble; trouble attracts blame; blame demands a scrapegoat. — David Mitchell

We all do what we do. — Ray Bradbury

I'm inclined to believe you need the psychiatrist. — Ray Bradbury

That's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and WORTH the doing. — Ray Bradbury

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. — Ray Bradbury

The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies. I'll show you my collection some day."
"Good."
"They want to know what I do with my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running. And sometimes, I tell them, I like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall in my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it? — Ray Bradbury

Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. — Ray Bradbury

You can't ever have my books. — Ray Bradbury

I like to hurt people too. I can make the cruelest choice. The difference is, sometimes I don't, and you always do, and that makes you evil. — Veronica Roth

I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going. — Ray Bradbury

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito
out! Every simile that would have made sub-moron's mouth twitch
gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer
lost!
Every story slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like
in the finale
Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention
shot dead. — Ray Bradbury

Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. — Ray Bradbury

When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people. — Ray Bradbury

And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating 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. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. 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. — Ray Bradbury

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things. — Ray Bradbury

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. - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury

You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, 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. Books were only one type or 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. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts. — Ray Bradbury

Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?"
"You sound so very old"
"Sometimes I'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always used to be that way? — Ray Bradbury

Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's burnt his damn wings, he wonders why — Ray Bradbury