Ray Bradbury Quotes

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“The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool.”

“Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.”

“We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”

“That's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and WORTH the doing.”

“Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.”

“Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”

“Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.”

“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.”

“I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.”

“When they give you lined paper, write the other way.”

“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”

“Libraries raised me.”

“That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”

“You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”

“I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.”

“Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.”

“Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.”

“A book is a loaded gun.”

“Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.”

“You fail only if you stop writing.”

“No person ever died that had a family.”

“The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.”

“There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves”

“Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”

“His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.”

“Are you happy?”

“God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.”

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.”

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”

“What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?”

“Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day..”

“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?”

“There was her face, like a summer peach, beautiful and warm, and the light of the candles reflected in her dark eyes. [He] held his breath. The entire world waited and held its breath.”

“But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.”

“What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”

“The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”

“Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.”

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”

“I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”

“I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.”

“She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why…. Luckily, queer ones like her don't happen often.”

“Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.”

“How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?”

“Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.”

“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

“I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.”

“For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead… We're nothing more than dust jackets for books… so many pages to a person…”

“I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago.
For a little while I'm not afraid.
Maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing at last.
Maybe it's because I've done a rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you.”