Ray Bradbury is da bomb - Fahrenheit 451 quote o' the day

[katilac]

"The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarden age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle."

[AmyP]

One of my favorites since the first time I read it. I love this book. :001_smile:

[flyingmommy]

Clearly, I need to reread this book. It's been too long since tenth grade. I remember very little and that one quote sounds interesting.

 

jeannie

[Snickerdoodle]

This is the part that keeps coming into my mind lately:

 

"More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before."

Mildred went out of the room and slammed the door. The parlour "aunts" began to laugh at the parlour "uncles.",

"Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog?lovers, the cat?lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second?generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the ****ed snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic?books survive. And the three?dimensional sex?magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade?journals."

 

snip

 

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.

 

 

snip

 

"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? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these."

"Yes."

 

[mom2att]

I just re-read this the other day. Much more meaningful this time around, as opposed to when I read it for Sophomore English!

[akmommy]

Great quote from one of my all time favorite books.

 

I read it for the first time in 8th grade after my english teacher Mr. Large recammended it. Mr. L always seemed to know what I would like and expanded my reading horizons a great deal that year.

[Greta]

I think it's time for me to re-read this too. I bet it would be a lot more meaningful reading it through a more mature lens. At least, I think I'm more mature now!

 

I had the privilege of meeting Ray Bradbury, briefly, at a book signing a few years ago. It was fun.

[FloridaLisa]

"The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarden age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle."

 

 

Love the book. I devoured it a bit too quickly last go 'round with ds1 so I'm looking forward to another reading through with dd1 and ds2.

 

Lisa

 

*Another favorite distopian book for middle grades is The Giver.

[momsquared]

I taught it a couple years ago and the kids loved it. Warning, though, the movie version is terrible. The kids found it hysterical but really a horrible adaptation.

[laughing lioness]

My 18 and 14 yo and I read that this year again- what a terrific book. My fav quote:

"I hate a Roman named Status Quo! he said to me. 'Stuff your eyes with wonder, "he said, "live as if you' drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's life away. 'To h*ll with that' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his a**." ~Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

[Peek a Boo]

It didn't come from the Government down.

 

THAT's the scary part.

[elw_miller]

This is my favorite book. I reread it about every other year or so. Time to pick it up again.

 

Amazing that it was written in the early 50s--the book is scarily prescient in so many ways. The seashells in their ears. The reality shows with "the family". The gigantic TVs that covered the walls. The quote about "snatching them from the cradle" that started this thread.

 

My husband and I allude to this book far too frequently for our own comfort, I think. Too many real Mildreds.

 

What books do you have in you? (Besides this one) :)

 

Thanks for posting this (scary as the quote is)!

[KrissiK]

That was a great book. However, his other books kind of creeped me out. I made it through "Dandelion Wine" and then picked up a book of his short stories and put them down quickly.