Fahrenheit 451 quote needed

[Ad_Astra]

Hey all,

I need a specific Fahrenheit 451 quote for a paper I’m writing, but I don’t have my copy of the book at the moment.

If I’m remembering correctly, there’s a scene during which Captain Beatty lets Guy Montag know that when he was younger, he was a voracious reader. Again, IIRC, he uses quite a bit of gustatory metaphors, as in “devouring books” and “tasting” them and the like. Does anyone have access to that passage/the ability to look that up? I would be much obliged.

Thanks in advance.

– Ad Astra

[filling_pages]

I can’t find that bit, but you’re welcome to search for yourself.

[Walloon]

I wonder if you might be conflating a non-fiction essay Bradbury wrote about his own love of books, with a speech given by Captain Beatty in Fahrenheit 451.

[Ad_Astra]

Walloon, I think that’s exactly what I was doing. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that it was part of the foreword or afterword or something else attached to my copy of the novel.

Thanks all!

[vampire_knight]

“Of course. You have to understand how Beatty became a burner of books. he has a history. he was a book reader, but after various crises in his life–his mother died of cancer, his father cimmitted sucide, his love affair fell apart–when he opened books, they were empty. they couldn’t help him. so he turned on the books and burned them.” (187) this was in the conversation with Ray Bradbury.

[Captain_Amazing]

I think I’ve found the quote you’re looking for. It’s not from the book, itself, but from one of Bradbury’s introductions. He’s talking about the book’s origins:

Fahrenheit 451 had a slightly different history.

I imagine its real root-system goes back to my great and abiding love of libraries.

From the time I was nine on up through my teens, I spent at least two nights a week in the town library in Waukegan, Illinois. In the summer months, there was hardly a day I could not be found lurking about the stacks, smelling the books like imported spices, drunk on them even before I read them.

Later, as a young writer, I found the best way to inspire myself was to go to the library in Los Angeles, and rove about, pulling books from shelves, reading a line here, a paragraph there, snatching, devouring, moving on and then suddenly writing on any handy piece of paper. Often, I stood for hours at the filing cabinet tables, scribbling on those small bits of paper kept for note-taking by researchers, afraid to quit and go home while the fever was on me.

It is obvious by now that I ate, drank, and slept books-of all types and sizes, colors and countries. My tastes ran shallow and then deep, narrow and then broad, all the way from John Carter, Warlord of Mars, to Aldous Huxley, from Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon in the town papers to Thomas Wolfe prowling those same mysterious and vibrant library stacks at the closing hours of night. And when Mr. Wolfe passed on along the aisle, here came Hamet’s Father’s ghost the other way, followed by Pip and Mr. Pickwick, and Marley’s Scrooge in dire need of saving.

All these I spoke in voices to myself within the library’s green-shaded gloom and on summer lawns declaimed to friends.

It followed then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history, they are one and the same flesh. Mind or body, put to the oven, is a sinful practice, and I carried this with me as I passed countless firehouse doors and patted the coach dogs there and admired my tall reflection in the downslung brass poles.