aza’s Reviews > A Pleasure to Burn: Chilling Dystopian Fiction Exploring Censorship and the Origins of Fahrenheit 451 > Status Update

“But he cried like a child. He hadn’t wanted to kill anyone, not even Leahy. Killing did nothing but kill something of yourself when you did it, and suddenly he saw Leahy again, a torch, screaming, and he shut his hand over his wet face, gagging. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”

“Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I’ve done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep, I followed them.”

“They needn’t have bothered. By that time people were uneducated. They stayed away from books, and, in ignorance, hated and feared them. You always fear something you don’t know. Men have been burned at the stake for centuries, for knowing too much.”

“‘And you know about rain,’ said Mr. Montag.
‘Yes. It takes good if you lean back and open your mouth. Go on!’
He leaned back and gasped.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s wine!’”

“And in the hospital looking down at her he had realized that if she should die in the next few minutes, he wouldn’t cry. For it was the dying of a stranger. And it was suddenly so very wrong that he had cried not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly man, empty, beside an empty woman while the doctors emptied her stomach still more.”

“God rest him, nothing of him left now. For what are we but books, and when those are gone, nothing’s to be seen.”

“She laughed. ‘If there were a Hallows’ Eve, I’d make it a date.’
‘But they burned that, too,’ he said.
‘Oh, they burned everything.’”

“On the side of the altar were the words, ‘WE WHO WERE BORN OF THE SUN RETURN TO THE SUN.’”

“‘Don’t be merciless, Kim. Have pity!’
Her face softens. She builds a cage around her face with convulsive fingers. Words escape the cage:
‘Is pity love? Is it, Paul?’
There is a bitter tiredness in her breathing.
You stand upright. ‘I’ll go crazy if this goes on!’
Wearily, her voice replies, ‘Can dead people go insane?’”