But,” whispered Tom, “oh, look. What’s up in that tree!” For the Tree was hung with a variety of pumpkins of every shape and size and a number of tints and hues of smoky yellow or bright orange. “A pumpkin tree,” someone said. “No,” said Tom. The wind blew among the high branches and tossed their bright burdens, softly. “A Halloween Tree,” said Tom. And he was right.
Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.
One thing people sometimes forget about Fahrenheit 451 is that the government doesn’t begin by burning books – it’s ordinary people who turn away from reading and the habits of thought and reflection it encourages. When the government starts actively censoring information, most people don’t even bat an eye. How important is reading to the health of a democracy like ours?
As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone’s happy.
So here, after fifty years, is Fahrenheit 451. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’m glad that it was done.
While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.
Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.
What – the smell of kerosene? My wife always complains,′ he laughed. ‘You never was it off completely.
I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. I put up with them when they come home three days a month; it’s not bad at all. You heave them into the ‘parlor’ and turn the switch. It’s like washing clothes; stuff laundry in and slam the lid.” Mrs. Bowles tittered. “They’d just as soon kick as kiss me. Thank God, I can kick back!
And wasn’t it the bright boy you selected for the beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against!
He had written a short story once called “The Pedestrian,” about a man who is incarcerated by the police after he is stopped simply for walking.
Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
It was not the hysterical light of electricity but – what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, when he was a child, in a power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed...
The sound of its death came after.
I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls.
What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began.
He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground.
And Ireland itself? Is the largest open-air penal colony in history.
What do you do, go around trying everything once?” he asked. “Sometimes twice.” She looked at something in her hand.
You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks.