How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Heck." Jim sniffed north, Jim sniffed south. "Where's that storm?" […]
Will let the wind ruffle and refit his clothes, his skin, his hair. Then he said faintly, "It'll be here. By morning."
"Who says?"
"The huckleberries all down my arms. They say." (2.47-2.50)
Fear is NOT just a mental thing in this novel; it manifests itself physically. This is a pretty scary thought, because it means that fear has tangible, physical powers over people.
Quote #2
"Never going to have any," said Jim.
"You just say that."
"I know it. I know everything."
[Jim's mother] waited a moment. "What do you know?"
"No use making more people. People die."
His voice was very calm and quiet and almost sad. (9.15-9.20)
Fear goes deeper than concerns over the supernatural.
Quote #3
Will heard it.
Muffled away in the prairie lands, the chuffing of an engine, the slow-following dragon-glide of a train.
Will sat up in bed.
Across the way, like a mirror image, Jim sat up, too. (11.2-11.5)
There is something slightly magical about the connections between Jim and Will, starting with their birthdays and going through to even the smallest of actions and thoughts.
Quote #4
They prowled on but found no mysterious midnight spheres of evil gas tied by mysterious Oriental knots to daggers plunged in dark earth, no maniac ticket takers bent on terrible revenges. The calliope by the ticket booth neither screamed deaths nor hummed idiot songs to itself. (15.20)
How much of Jim and Will's fear is just in their heads?
Quote #5
But Jim said nothing. After a long time he clapped his hand to the back of his neck. "It really does!" he cried, in soft amaze.
"What does?"
"Hair! I read it all my life. In scary movies, it stands on end. Mine's doing it – now!" "Gosh, Jim so's mine!"
They stood entranced with the delicious cold bumps on their necks and the suddenly stiffened small hairs quilled up over their scalps. (15.45-15.48)
Take a look at what specific things induce fear in Jim and Will – what do these things have in common? Why are they so scary?
Quote #6
Stolen? No. Jim take it down? Yes. Why? For the shucks of it. Smiling, he had climbed to scuttle the iron, dare any storm to strike his house! Afraid? No. Fear was a new electric-power suit Jim must try on for size. (29.5)
Jim and Will see fear in a fundamentally different way. While Will wants to conquer or rid himself of ear, Jim is intrigued and enchanted by it.
Quote #7
What was there about the boys that made him believe the simplest word they whispered up through the grille? Fear itself was proof here, and he had seen enough fear in his life to know it, like the smell from a butcher's shop in summer twilight. (37.19)
Again, look at the way Bradbury uses very physical words to describe the sensation of fear. Fear has a smell; it hits the physical senses rather than just the mental ones.
Quote #8
Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension:
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes. (37.27-37.28)
Notice that Charles is the one to make the connection between the carnival and Macbeth; in his age and wisdom, he understands things about fear and wickedness that the boys do not.
Quote #9
Secretly, Dark gathered a pinch of flesh on his wrist, the illustration of a black-nun blind woman, which he bit with his fingernails. (46.37)
How does Bradbury use language to induce fear in the reader?
Quote #10
And Charles Halloway took the next step into the maze.
Ahead flowed sluices of silver light, deep slabs of shadow, polished, wiped, rinsed with images of themselves and others whose souls, passing, scoured the glass with their agony, curried the cold ice with their narcissism, or sweated the angles and flats with their fear. (48.42-48.43)
Charles is able to directly face his fear by stepping into the mirror maze. There, he must take a good hard look at his old face and body – the source of his desire to grow younger.