If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
- Juan Ramon
Jimenez
Clarisse:
I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because
they never see them slowly. If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes!
he's say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose garden! White blurs
are houses. Brown blurs are cows... I rarely watch the 'parlor walls' or
go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I
guess. Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the country
beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet
long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the
advertising out so it would last.
Clarisse's uncle?:
Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your
nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow,
wad, flush. Everyone using everyone else's coattails. How are you
supposed to root for the home team when you don't even have a program or
know the names? For that matter, what color jerseys are they wearing as
they trot out on the field?
Clarisse:
I've to go see my psychiatrist now. They make me go. I make up
things to say. I don't know what he thinks of me. He says I'm a regular
onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers... The psychiatrist wants
to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds
and collect butterflies.. I'll show you my collection some day... They
want to know what I do with all my time. I tell them that sometimes I
just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them
running.
Clarisse:
I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social
indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to
me means talking to you about things like this. Or talking about how
strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's
social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do
you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running,
another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more
sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't;
they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there
for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all.
It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out
the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so
ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head
for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window
Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel
ball... I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any
friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is
either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another.
Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?
Clarisse:
People don't talk about anything... They name a lot of cars or clothes
or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same
things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.
The woman at 11 No. Elm, City:
'Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by
God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.'
When Montag asks Beatty about what the woman said, Beatty replies:
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.
Line from a book that Montag saw from a page that was being burned:
Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.