Fahrenheit 451
Clarrise
Captain Beety
Faber
Old Woman
Situational
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Page 74 paragraph 4
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“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.
Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the
incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes
after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by
helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black
dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all,
burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
page 50
Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book lit,
almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim,
wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words
delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant
to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there
with fiery steel. “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.” He dropped
the book. Immediately, another fell into his arms.
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“Mildred, how would it be if, well, maybe I quit my job awhile?”
“You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one
night, some woman and her books—”
“You should have seen her, Millie!”
“She’s nothing to me; she shouldn’t have had books. It was her responsibility,
she should’ve thought of that. I hate her. She’s got you going and next thing you
know we’ll be out, no house, no job, nothing.”
“You weren’t there, you didn’t see,” he said. “There must be something in
books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there
must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
“She was simple-minded.