ela figurative language and theme

Beaty lay like a charred wax doll

Simile

He felt his head turn like stone carving to the dark place next door

Simile

Their covers were torn out and spilled out like swan feather

Simile

The books leaped and danced like roasted birds

Simile and Personification

He gave the room a gift of one huge bright yellow flower of burning

personification and metaphor

The city […] all wrapped up in its coat of many colors

allusion

There was a great hiss like a great mouthful of spittle banging a red hot stove

onomatopoeia and simile

Old montag wantd to fly near the sun and now that hes burnt his d… wings, he wonders why

allusion and metaphor

Their faces are like blanched meat

simile

The other [leg] was like a piece of burnt pine log

simile

A shotgun blast went off in his leg every time he put it down

metaphor and hyperbole

Faber was dead, baked like a roach in that small green capsule

simile

A man who was nothing but a frame skeleton

metaphor

His lungs were like burning brooms in his chest

simile

He could see the helicopters falling like the first flakes of snow

simile

The house did not reply

personification

The house was still […] sleeping

personification

Helicopters fluttering like torn bits of paper in the sky

simile

Another rap, a whisper

personification and onomatopoeia

Keep an eye peeled

idiom

His sweat […] as numerous as the jewels of a small chandelier

simile

He was luminous cloud

metaphor

The helicopter like a grotesque flower

simile

There was a whirring, clicking, humming

onomatopoeia

This was his own chess game that he was witnessing, move by move

metaphor

His voice like butter

simile

Montag froze

idiom

The parlor that was dead and gray as the waters of an ocean

simile

It’s [reading] mud to you, too

metaphor

Sitting there like a wax doll melting in its own hea

simile

[each page] become a black butterfly

metaphor

The train radio vomited upon montag

personification

The train hissed to its stop

personification and onomatopoeia

[chirst] is a regular peppermint stick now

allusion and metaphor

His hands, by themselves, like two men working together

simile

I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths

simile and personification

Im the queen bee, safe in the hive

metaphor

Mildred ran from the parlor like a native feeling an eruption of Vesuvius

simile and allusion

They were like monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes

simile and onomatopoeia

He saw their Chesire cat smiles burning through the walls of the house

allusion

The three empty walls were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now empty of dreams

simile

The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness

hyperbole and paradox

Faber was a gray moth sleeping in his ear for a moment

metaphor

His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never rested

simile

Montag sat like a carved white stone

simile

You think you can walk on water with your books

personification and idiom

You’ve been locked up here with a regular Tower of Babel

Allusion

He stood there very cold, his face a mask of ice

metaphor

The open door looked at him with its vacant eye

personification

We are heading right for the cliff

idiom and hyperbole

“But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”

Conformity vs. Individuality

“Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking.  It’s like being a pedestrian, only rarer.  My uncle was arrested another time – did I tell you? – for being a pedestrian.  Oh, we’re most peculiar.” 

Conformity vs. Individuality

"You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that."

Conformity vs. Individuality

"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.”

Conformity vs. Individuality

"We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise."

Conformity v. Individuality

"We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam."

 Conformity v. Individuality

"...We're going to build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them."

Conformity v. Individuality

“Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush. Everyone using ever else’s coattails.”

Conformity v. Individuality

“Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers … Baptists … Texans …. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy! …. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca.” 

Censorship

“You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. 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. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.”

Censorship

“The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle.”

Censorship

“Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

Censorhsip

“He made more soft sounds.  He stumbled toward the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow.  He fell into the bed and his wife cried out started.  He lay far across the room from here, on a winter island separated by an empty sea.”

Alienation and Loneliness

"Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

Alienation and Loneliness

“How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn't it? "What a shame! You're not in love with anyone !" And why not?”

Alienation and Loneliness

“Let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”

Alienation and Loneliness

“We’ve got to start somewhere here, figuring out why we’re in such a mess, you and the medicine nights, and the car, and me and my work.  We’re heading right for the cliff, Millie.  God, I don’t want to go over.  This isn’t going to be easy.  We haven’t got anything to go on, but maybe we can piece it together and figure it and help each other…And if there is something here, just one little thing out of a whole mess of things, maybe we can pass it on to someone else.”

Change and Transformation

“It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”

Change and Transformation

“The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

Change and Transformation

“I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.”

Change and Transformation

“Mildred watched the toast delivered to her plate. She had both ears plugged with electronic bees that were humming the hour away…. She was an expert at lip reading from ten years of apprenticeship at Seashell ear thimbles.

Dangers of Technology

"Nobody listens any more. 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. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense.”

Dangers of Technology

“Will you turn the parlor off?" [Montag] asked. "That's my family." "Will you turn it off for a sick man?" "I'll turn it down."
"My 'family' is people. They tell me things: I laugh, they laugh! And the colors!"

Dangers of Technology

“But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlor? It grows you any shape it wishes!

Dangers of Technology

“ What a dreadful surprise, for everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are.”

Responsibility and Consequences

“Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.”

Responsibility and Consequences

"Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"

Responsibility and Consequences

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.”

Responsibility and Consequences

“All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need intact and safe. We’re not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good.”

Ignorance v. Knowledge

“The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we mustn’t be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world.”

Ignorance v. Knowledge

“He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.”

Ignorance v. Knowledge

There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there.  You don’t stay for nothing.”

Ignorance v. Knowledge

“Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries…”

Ignorance v. Knowledge

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

Ignorance v. Knowledge

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon.”

Ignorance v. Knowledge

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores.”

Ignorance v. Knowledge

"The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys... you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world."

Happiness

"Are you happy?"

Happiness

"We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help."

Happiness

"I don't know what it is. I'm so unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and don't know what. I might even start reading books. […] Before I hurt someone. Did you hear Beatty? Did you listen to [Beatty]? He knows all the answers. He's right. Happiness is important. Fun is everything. And yet I kept sitting there saying to myself, I'm not happy, I'm not happy." 

Happiness

"I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always used to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid. My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different.”

Violence

“Patience, Montag. Let the war turn off the ‘families.’ Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge."

Violence

“A minute later, Three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other's limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter. Two minutes more and the room whipped out of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again. Montag saw a number of bodies fly in the air.”

Violence