Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451

Isa Hazelaar

'Mr Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I’m  one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the "guilty", but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. 

Angelica Garcia

i just feel bad for BOTH of them. guy is taking the woke pill and it’s working FAST

laine

Wasn’t there an old joke about the wife who talked so much on the telephone that her desperate husband ran out to the nearest store and telephoned her to ask what was for dinner? Well, then why didn’t he buy himself and audio-Seashell broadcasting station and talk to his wife late at night, murmur, whisper, shout, scream, yell. But what would he whisper, what would he yell? What could he say?

And suddenly she was so strange he couldn’t believe he knew her at all.

“Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. … But many were those whose sole knowledge of 

… was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: 

at last 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.

“When the war’s over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.”

“Do you really think they’ll listen then?”

“If not, we’ll just have to wait. We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t 

 people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.”

“Everyone must leave something being when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house… 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.”

perhaps one of my favourite passages from the entire book.

“We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. … Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”

I am unsure why I didn’t read this sooner? It reminded me similar to 1984 but not at the same time. Both books want to provoke the reader how easy it is to follow a current system because it is what is “normal” for us rather than asking questions. 

Jazz

I loved loved loved this book so much, sadly the end was what I consider an open ending, with so many possibilities, I for one prefer a closure but this is a personal preference 

Fahrenheit 451

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