Première English Name:________________________________

Summer Reading: Fahrenheit 451

Idea Review Class:____________________________

Quotations to Discuss:

Find the quotation in your book. Who said it?

To whom? In what situation?

Relate it to a THEME or LESSON in the novel, an IDEA in your own head, or something in LIFE.

Part One: The Hearth and the Salamander

1. “‘Are you happy?’ she said.

‘Am I what?’ he cried.”

2. “‘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…That’s not social to me at all.’”

3. “‘Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending…More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience.’”

4. “‘Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally “bright”…? And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike.’”

Part Two: The Sieve and the Sand

5. “‘How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives!...Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard, and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much?’”

6. “‘Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward.’”

7. “‘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…The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us…You are intuitively right, that’s what counts. Three things are missing.’”

8. “‘Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord…I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them.’”

Part Three: Burning Bright

9. “ ‘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…The difference between a man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching…The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”