Shivani’s Reviews > Fahrenheit 451 > Status Update

'Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten sec-onds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guaran-tees, ask for no security, there never was such an ani-mal. And if there were, it would be related to the Beat sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away.

"Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said earlier, he was a sculptor. 'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me.

Montage turned and glanced back.
What did you give to the city, Montag?
Ashes.
What did the others give to each other?
Nothingness.

One of them had to stop burning. The sun wouldn't, certainly. So it looked as if it had to be Mon-tag and the people he had worked with until a few short hours ago. Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe

he knew why he must never burn again in his life.
The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt!

How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn't it? "What a shame! You're not in love with anyone!" And why not?