Thanks again to my friend Mike R for introducing me to another great book – Fahrenheit 451 (which is “the temperature at which all books catch fire and burn”) by Ray Bradbury. I’ve heard of the author before, but for some reason I’ve never been interested in reading any of his books. Big mistake.

This is definitely a classic yet it’s quite easy to read; in fact, I finished this in only 3 sittings (two of which were during my lunch break), or less than two hours. But that’s another mistake. This book is not meant for speed-reading, which is why I’m planning to re-read this again (slowly this time).

Here are some of the interesting quotations from Fahrenheit 451 that can really make you think:

[Fire’s] real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word “intellectual,” of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar.

Intellectual as a swear word. I like that.

If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it.

Why does this kind of government sound so strangely familiar? Oh well. I will NOT write about politics here.

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

That’s the reason why I love Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It touches life beautifully.

You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by.

The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom – the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.

There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.

Unfortunately, though this is a very beautiful verse, the first thing that came to my mind was the image of Jean Grey aka Phoenix from the X-Men, and Fawkes, Dumbledore’s phoenix from Harry Potter

Stuff your eyes with wonder… Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that … shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.

Another beautiful verse, ruined by the sudden image of Sid – not my boyfriend Sid – but Sid the sloth from the movie Ice Age, shaking his ass.