100 Great Words from "Fahrenheit 451" -- Part I Vocabulary

With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black.

He strode in a swarm of fireflies.

He strode in a swarm of fireflies.

Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark.

He slid to a squeaking halt, the heels one inch from the concrete floor downstairs.

He walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the subway where the silent, air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its lubricated flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air an to the cream-tiled escalator rising to the suburb.

Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.

Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting?

But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello, and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the phoenix-disc on his chest, he spoke again.

“No, you don't,” she said, in awe.

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact.

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact.

Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it.

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred.

Montag laughed abruptly.

My uncle was arrested another time-did I tell you?-for being a pedestrian.

“What?” asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience.

“What?” asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience.

People were more often-he searched for a simile, found one in his work-torches, blazing away until they whiffed out.

It was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon had set.

Complete darkness, not a hint of the silver world outside, the windows tightly shut, the chamber a tomb-world where no sound from the great city could penetrate.

He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be thought as he stood shivering in the dark, and let his lips go on moving and moving.

The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one's yard.

The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached.

Leave that stuff in the blood and the blood hits the brain like a mallet, bang, a couple of thousand times and the brain just gives up, just quits.”

We got a contra-sedative in her.

And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with the eyes of puff-adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out the door.

Above all, their laughter was relaxed and hearty and not forced in any way, coming from the house that was so brightly lit this late at night while all the other houses were kept to themselves in darkness.

Montag moved back to his own house, left the window wide, checked Mildred, tucked the covers about her carefully, and then lay down with the moonlight on his cheek-bones and on the frowning ridges in his brow, with the moonlight distilled in each eye to form a silver cataract there.

He tried to conjure up a face to fit the words, but there was no face.

“I've got to go to see my psychiatrist now.

You're peculiar, you're aggravating, yet you're easy to forgive.

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse.

Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.

Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.

It was like a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself.

At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first.

Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine.

But now at night he lay in his bunk, face turned to the wall, listening to whoops of laughter below and the piano-string scurry of rat feet, the violin squeaking of mice, and the great shadowing, motioned silence of the Hound leaping out like a moth in the raw light, finding, holding its victim, inserting the needle and going back to its kennel to die as if a switch had been turned.

It growled again, a strange rasping combination of electrical sizzle, a frying sound, a scraping of metal, a turning of cogs that seemed rusty and ancient with suspicion.

It has a trajectory we decide for it.

And most of the time in the cafes they have the jokeboxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the coloured patterns running up and down, but it's only colour and all abstract.

The flutter of cards, motion of hands, of eyelids, the drone of the time-voice in the firehouse ceiling “...one thirty-five.

The tick of the playing-cards on the greasy table-top, all the sounds came to Montag, behind his closed eyes, behind the barrier he had momentarily erected.

Were all firemen picked then for their looks as well as their proclivities?

“They took him screaming off to the asylum”

He opened his mouth and it was Clarisse McClellan saying, “Didn't firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and get them going?”

Beatty, Stoneman, and Black ran up the sidewalk, suddenly odious and fat in the plump fireproof slickers.

He slapped her face with amazing objectivity and repeated the question.

A fountain of books sprang down upon Montag as he climbed shuddering up the sheer stair-well.

The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house.

She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked in their nostrils as they plunged about.

Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face A book alighted, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering.

Montag's hand closed like a mouth, crushed the book with wild devotion, with an insanity of mindlessness to his chest.

Now, it plunged the book back under his arm, pressed it tight to sweating armpit, rushed out empty, with a magician's flourish!

Captain Beatty, keeping his dignity, backed slowly through the front door, his pink face burnt and shiny from a thousand fires and night excitements.

“A man named Latimer said that to a man named Nicholas Ridley, as they were being burnt alive at Oxford, for heresy, on October 16, 1555.”

He held his pants out into an abyss and let them fall into darkness.

His hands were ravenous.

She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

I hope I've clarified things.

He tried to count how many times she swallowed and he thought of the visit from the two zinc-oxide-faced men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths and the electronic-eyed snake winding down into the layer upon layer of night and stone and stagnant spring water, and he wanted to call out to her, how many have you taken TONIGHT! the capsules! how many will you take later and not know? and so on, every hour! or maybe not tonight, tomorrow night!

The most significant memory he had of Mildred, really, was of a little girl in a forest without trees (how odd!) or rather a little girl lost on a plateau where there used to be trees (you could feel the memory of their shapes all about) sitting in the centre of the “living-room.”

When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom...and you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either...never...quite... touched. anything.

You drowned in music and pure cacophony.

He could only pantomime, hoping she would turn his way and see him.

He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon.

“Wasn't he a radical?”

A child feigning illness, afraid to call because after a moment's discussion, the conversation would run so: “Yes, Captain, I feel better already."

And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the ceiling and the pump-snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes moving in their mouths when they talked.

Captain Beatty sat down in the most comfortable chair with a peaceful look on his ruddy face.

“Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere.

Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down.

“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at. dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”

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.”

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.”

The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere.

There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!

Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

You always dread the unfamiliar.

Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him.

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.

They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors.

Beatty knocked his pipe into the palm of his pink hand, studied the ashes as if they were a symbol to be diagnosed and searched for meaning.

Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams.

We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early.

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.

Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide?rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.

I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration.

Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world.

They're about non-existent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction.

All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.

But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life.

The converter attachment, which had cost them one hundred dollars, automatically supplied her name whenever the announcer addressed his anonymous audience, leaving a blank where the proper syllables could be filled in.

A special spot/wavex/scrambler also caused his televised image, in the area immediately about his lips, to mouth the vowels and consonants beautifully.

They turned to stare at the door and the books toppled everywhere, everywhere in heaps.