Honors English 9

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Double-Entry Journal: Fahrenheit 451 Quotation 1. “With the brass nozzle in his fists… his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning.”

Response This description shows how much Montag loves his job, and he considers himself to be the conductor of fire which puts him above other people. He tells the flames where to go and what to do. This also implies that the burning of books is a good thing in this world. People are encouraged to burn books, burn knowledge and people are happy to do it. It makes Montag feel powerful and in control when he burns books. (This is an example of a student response.)

2. “It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things blackened and changed.”

3. “They walked still farther 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.’ He laughed. 4. “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 has 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” (12)

Montag rejects the idea and even laughs at it saying “Houses have always been fireproof.” It seems that in this future, the past has been forgotten or even erased and people have been told that people have always started fires and not stopped them. (This is an example of a student response.)

Honors English 9 5. “There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us, and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life” (16).

6. “Well, after all, this is the age of disposable tissue. Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush. Everyone using everyone else’s coattails. How are you supposed to root for the home team when you don’t even have a program or know the names? For that matter, what color jerseys are they wearing as the trot out on the field?” (17).

7. “I’m still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.”… “Rain even tastes good” (21).

8. “The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies. I’ll show you my collection someday. 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

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Honors English 9

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head back, like this, and let the rain fall in my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it?” (23). 9. “Come off it. It doesn’t like or dislike. It just ‘functions.’ It’s like a lesson in ballistics. It has a trajectory we decide on for it. It follows through. It targets itself, homes itself, and cuts off. It’s only copper wire, storage batteries, and electricity.”… “All of those chemical balances and percentages on all of us here in the House are recorded in the master file downstairs. It would be easy for someone to set up a partial combination on the Hound’s ‘memory,’ a touch of amino acids, perhaps. That would account for what the animal did just now. Reacted to me” (26).

10. “Oh, they don’t miss me,” she said. “I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this.”… “But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers to you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film teacher. That’s not social to me at all, it’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and then telling us its wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed…” (29-30).

Clarisse is explaining how she feels about school and the learning process to Montag.

Honors English 9 11. “Any man’s insane who thinks he can fool the government and us” (33).

12. “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? The pink face of Beatty now showed the faintest panic in the door. The woman’s hand twitched on the single matchstick. The fumes of kerosene bloomed up about her. Montag felt the hidden book pound like a heart against his chest.”… “Beatty flicked his fingers to spark the kerosene. He was too late. Montag gasped. The woman on the porch reached out with contempt to them all and struck the kitchen match against the railing” (39-40).

13. “He pressed the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odor of kerosene made him vomit. Mildred came in, humming. She was surprised. ‘Why’d you do that?’ He looked with dismay at the floor. ‘We burnt an old woman with her books.’ ‘It’s a good thing the rug’s washable’” (49).

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Honors English 9 14. “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your cameras. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”… “Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a twominute book column, winding up at last as a ten-or-twelve-line dictionary resume” (54).

15. “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped. English and spelling gradually, gradually neglected, finally almost ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work” (55).

16. “With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, becomes the swear word it deserved to be. You 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?

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Honors English 9

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17. “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” (61).

18. " 'Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?' (70)

Montag arguing to Mildred the need for books. This quote also explains the continual warfare occurring in the novel. (This is an example of a student response.)

19. “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” (82). 20. “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. 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. Three things are missing. Number one: Do you know why books such as this are 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 like under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often” (83).

Honors English 9 21. “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” (145).

22. “Montag cried out in the silence and turned away. Silence. And then, after a time of the men sitting around the fire, their faces expressionless, an announcer on the dark screen said, ‘The search is over, Montag is dead; a crime against society has been avenged” (149).

23. “But 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” (153). 24. “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 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 for a lifetime” (156-157).

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Honors English 9 25. “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.”… “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” (164).

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