Fahrenheit 451: Part 2

Montag did not look back at his wife as he went trembling along the hall to the kitchen, where he stood a long time watching the rain hit the windows before he came back down the hall in the grey light, waiting for the tremble to subside.

The old man admitted to being a retired English professor who had been thrown out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage.

The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass.

“It's an insidious plan, if I do say so myself.”

Faber opened the bedroom door and led Montag into a small chamber where stood a table upon which a number of metal tools lay among a welter of microscopic wire-hairs, tiny coils, bobbins, and crystals.

A minute later, three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other's limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter.

He searched the house and found the books where Mildred had stacked them behind the refrigerator. Some were missing and he knew that she had started on her own slow process of dispersing the dynamite in her house, stick by stick.

I must admit that your blind raging invigorated me. God, how young I felt!

For these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with Job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands seemed gloved with blood.

Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning, we've cried.

...The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us...

...I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point!

And you got in and we drove back to the firehouse in beatific silence, all dwindled away to peace.

Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.

He glanced perfunctorily at it, and shoved it in his pocket.