Fahrenheit 451 Quotes by Ray Bradbury with Techniques and Themes 🔥

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#11: “If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. 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.”

• Characters: Beatty
• Technique: Metaphor, monosyllabic phrases, truncated sentence
• Chapter: Part I

#12: “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.”

• Characters: Faber
• Technique: Rhetorical questions, metaphor, cumulative listing
• Chapter: Part I

#13: “Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Cultural allusion, allegory, metaphor, exclamation, exaggerated tone
• Chapter: Part I

Analysis:

The quote explores the power of books to bring people out of a state of ignorance and help them avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past.

The metaphor of the “cave” references the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic. In Plato’s republic, people who are trapped in a cave only see shadows on the wall and are not able to comprehend true reality. The cultural allusion poses the act of reading as a tool for escaping the limits of our understanding.

Montag also uses ambiguity and irony when he declares that “maybe the books can get us half out of the cave”. He implies that books are not entirely effective in preventing people from making mistakes, which suggests that there is more knowledge than in books to be acquired. You can interpret in many ways: for example, it might be the knowledge of our own willpower that gets people entirely out of the cave.

This ambiguity contrasts with the exaggerated tone in Montag’s final words “same, damn, insane mistakes!”. This suggests that the only thing he is sure of is the repeating of the past when ignorance is taken as the status quo.

#14: “Happiness is important. Fun is everything. And yet I kept sitting there saying to myself, I’m not happy, I’m not happy. I am.” Mildred’s mouth beamed. “And proud of it.”

• Characters: Mildred, to Montag
• Technique: Truncated sentence, repetition
• Chapter: Part I

#15: “​​You weren’t hurting anyone, you were hurting only things!”

• Characters: Montag, to himself
• Technique: Anaphora
• Chapter: Part I

#16: “God, thought Montag, how true! Always at night the alarm comes. Never by day! Is it because fire is prettier by night? More spectacle, a better show?”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Truncated sentence, rhetorical question, motif of fire
• Chapter: Part I

Analysis: 

The quote reflects how the the burning of books is considered a spectacle and is only done at night when it can be seen more clearly. Thus, the destruction of knowledge is a form of entertainment in Montag’s society.

Found in many Fahrenheit 451 quotes, the use of interior monologue helps to sound out Monatg’s criticism and disappointment in the superficial nature of his society. His fragmented language tells us of his shock and surprise towards the truth of his society.

We are introduced to the motif of fire in Montag’s rhetorical question “Is it because fire is prettier by night? More spectacle, a better show?”. Here, society weaponises fire because it is “prettier by night” — yet, the motif also foreshadows the internal destruction of the society itself through the connotations of fire as rebirth.

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

• Characters: Beatty
• Technique: Contradictions, rhetorical questions, tricolon
• Chapter: Part I

#18: “I’m not thinking. I’m just doing like I’m told, like always. You said get the money and I got it. I didn’t really think of it myself. When do I start working things out on my own?” 

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Truncated sentence, anaphora, rhetorical question
• Chapter: Part I

#19: “​​I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! you think they’re backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.”

• Characters: Beatty
• Technique: Exclamatory, metaphor
• Chapter: Part I

Fahrenheit 451 Quotes about Control, Censorship and Freedom

#20: “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal”

• Characters: Beatty
• Technique: Subversion, intertextuality – reference to Orwell, irony
• Chapter: Part I

#21: “It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. . . . It’s a mystery. . . clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.”

• Characters: Beatty
• Technique: Irony, tricolon, cumulative listing
• Chapter: Part II

#22: “as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors.”

• Characters: Beatty, to Montag
• Technique: Patriarchal government, listing
• Chapter: Part I

#23: “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.”

• Characters: Beatty
• Technique: Repetition, rhetorical questions, motif of fire
• Chapter: Part I

#24: “​​She didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. 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.”

• Characters: Beatty, Clarisse
• Technique: Condescending tone, lack of empathy
• Chapter: Part I

Analysis: 

The quote implies that Clarisse’s curious attitude is dangerous in a society that values ignorance over knowledge and understanding. In other words, asking “why” is best avoided.

The hyperbole “The poor girl’s better off dead” demonstrates the extreme nature of Montag’s society, which prefers to quash Clarisse than to understand her curiosity.

There is also irony in Beatty’s claim as it begs the question of why is it dangerous to ask questions. Through the exaggerated nature of the society’s sanctions against knowledge, it only goes to show how powerful that knowledge is.

#25: “It was a pleasure to burn.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Opening line, motif of fire
• Chapter: Part I

#26: “They walked still further and the girl said, “Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?” “No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it.” “Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.””

• Characters: Clarisse and Montag
• Technique: Innocent tone, irony
• Chapter: Part I

#27: “I—I’ve been thinking. About the fire last week. About the man whose library we fixed. What happened to him?” “They took him screaming off to the asylum.” “He wasn’t insane.” Beatty arranged his cards quietly. “Any man’s insane who thinks he can fool the government and us.”

• Characters: Montag and Beatty
• Technique: Truncated sentence, unsure tone, dismissive tone
• Chapter: Part I

#28: “But they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.”

• Characters: Beatty
• Technique: Juxtaposition, fire motif
• Chapter: Part II

#29: “That small motion, the white and red color, a strange fire because it meant a different thing to him. It was not burning, it was warming. … He hadn’t known fire could look this way. He had never thought in his life that it could give as well as take.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Subversion of the fire motif, colour symbolism
• Chapter: Part III

Analysis: 

The Fahrenheit 451 quote portrays Montag’s ephiphany and his new perspective on the world. Once a destructive force, the motif of fire has taken on a new significance for him — one of warmth and comfort.

This quote heavily relies on subverting the motif of fire. The “strange fire” is personified as Montag sees that “it [fire] was not burning, it was warming”. The weaponised destruction of society’s fire transforms to a fire that is life-giving and nourishing for Montag and the revolutionaries.

The contrast “it could give as well as take” finalises Montag’s ephiphany. He realises there is a symbolic dichotomy to the “red and white” fire — against destruction, there is also hope and rebirth for his society.

Fahrenheit 451 Quotes about Technology and Mass Media

#30: “The converter attachment, which had cost them one hundred dollars, automatically supplied her name whenever the announcer addressed his anonymous audience”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Assonance 
• Chapter: Part I

#31: “family talked and talked and talked to her, where the family prattled and chatted and said her name and smiled at her and said nothing of the bomb that was an inch, now a half inch, now a quarter inch from the top of the hotel.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Repetition
• Chapter: Part III

#32: “Abruptly the room took off on a rocket flight into the clouds; it plunged into a lime-green sea where blue fish at red and yellow fish. A minute later, three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other’s limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter. Two minutes more and the room whipped out of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again. Montag saw a number of bodies fly in the air.”

• Characters: TV program that Mildred watched
• Technique: Metaphor, descriptive language, arbitrary violence, plosives
• Chapter: Part I

#33: “But you can’t make 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.”

• Characters: Granger
• Technique: Truncated sentence, wise tone
• Chapter: Part III

#34: “We get these cases nine or ten a night. Got so many, starting a few years ago, we had the special machines built.”

• Characters: Operator, regarding Mildred’s attempted suicide
• Technique: Frivolous tone, conveys how common suicide is in this dystopian society
• Chapter:  Part I

#35: “With an effort, Montag reminded himself again that this was no fictional episode to be watched on his run to the river; it was in actuality his own chess game he was witnessing, move by move.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Metaphor, first-person possessive, irony, complex sentence structure, contrast 
• Chapter: Part III

Analysis:

This quote explores Montag’s struggle between distinguishing between reality and fiction. What he is experiencing is not something he is passively watching on TV with no real-life consequences. Montag is aware that he is a pawn in a larger game and that he may contribute actions that have an affect upon society.

The use of chess as a metaphor for Montag’s life suggests that he feels like his life is a game — however, he can either be a pawn played by others or and he can free himself by making his own move against his oppressive society.

The phrase “fictional episode” provides a sense of irony to Montag’s thoughts. His ironic thoughts are a product of his society, which is so focused on entertainment that it leads him to believe that he is merely a man reduced to play out a series of scripted events.

This struggle between detaching reality from fiction is suggested in the complex sentence structure itself, which imbues Montag’s feelings of entrapment to the prolonged cadence of the sentences.

Yet, this contrasts the use of first-person possessive in the phrase “his own chess game”, where Montag demands his own agency and purpose.

#36: “He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great séance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Intertextuality – referencing Shakespeare, metaphor
• Chapter: Part III

Lack of Authenticity in Human Interaction

#37: “It’s our third marriage each and we’re independent. Be independent, we always said. He said, if I get killed off, you just go right ahead and don’t cry, but get married again and don’t think of me.”

• Characters: Mrs Phelps
• Technique: Lack of empathy, lack of connection between married characters
• Chapter: Part II

#38: “We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Truncated sentence, irony
• Chapter: Part II

#39: “Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Motif of fire
• Chapter: Part I

#40: “She started up her walk. Then she seemed to remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. “Are you happy?” she said. “Am I what?” he cried.”

• Characters: Clarisse and Montag
• Technique: Humour, symbolism
• Chapter: Part I

Analysis: 

In this quote, Clarrise’s question to Montag about whether he is happy bewilders him. The quote shows Montag’s ignorance of what happiness even is and, by extension, his inability to be aware of his own emotion.

There is symbolism in the character of Clarisse herself and her question. As a young girl who is not yet aware of society’s rules, her innocent question “are you happy?” symbolises individuality and personal freedom in the novel. Clarisse’s question is a turning point for Montag that begins his question of the society he lives in.

The imagery in “she seemed to remember something…looked at him with wonder and curiosity” is imbued with both humour and irony. Despite being seen as “naive”, it is Clarrise who remembers the importance of happiness. This contrasts with Montag’s hyperbolic confusion, who even fails to speak the word “happiness” when he repeats “Am I what?”.

#41: “He opened the bedroom door. It was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon has set. Complete darkness, not a hint of the silver world outside, the windows tightly shut, the chamber a tomb-world where no sound from the great city could penetrate.“

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Setting, descriptive language, metaphor
• Chapter: Part I

#42: “…her eyes all glass, and breath going in and out, softly, faintly, in and out her nostrils, and her not caring whether it came or went, went or came.”

• Characters: About Mildred
• Technique: Antithesis, unsettling description
• Chapter: Part I

#43: “…How did you pick your work and how did you happen to think to take the job you have? 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.”

• Characters: Mildred, talking to Montag
• Technique: truncated sentence, romantic imagery
• Chapter: Part I

#44: “She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend’s house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.”

• Characters: Mildred and Montag
• Technique: Descriptive language, sense of intimacy
• Chapter: Part I

#45: “But he read and the worlds fell through, and he thought, in a few hours, there will be Beatty, and here will be me handing this over, so no phrase must escape me, each line must be memorized. I will myself to do it.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Metaphor, sense of desparateness, imperative language
• Chapter: Part II

#46: “Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the face of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enamelled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion… But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Religious iconography, metaphor
• Chapter: Part II

#47: “Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them. But all the light had come from the campfire, and these men had seemed no different than any others who had run a long race, searched a long search, seen good things destroyed.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: imagery, Subversion of the fire motif, sense of community
• Chapter: Part III

Analysis: 

This Fahrenheit 451 quote describes Montag’s disappointment when he meets a group of people who are part of the resistance. Though Montag had expected these people to be different, to possess some sort of special knowledge or power, he finds that they are ordinary people.

The use of phrases like “faces to burn and glitter,” “glow as lanterns glow,” and “light in them” depict the certain image of what the resistance shoud look like that Montag had. The use of supernatural imagery demonstrates how Montag had glamorised the resistance to be more than human — a saviour of sorts, instead of men like Montag.

Thus, a subverision of the fire motif is played out when Montag ironically finds disappointment and a new perspective. Montag must come to terms that the real knowledge and power can be instigated by ordinary men, despite the fact that they might not “look the part”.

#48: “Darkness. 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.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Juxtaposition, simile, truncated sentence
• Chapter: Part III

#49: “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. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.”

• Characters: Montag
• Technique: Irony
• Chapter: Part II

#50: “She laughed an odd little laugh that went up and up. “Funny, how funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband or wife.”

• Characters: Mildred and Montag
• Technique: Ridiculous, repetition
• Chapter: Part I