Ray Bradbury Quotes

page 5

“The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water…. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water….”

“And metaphors like cats behind your smile,
Each one wound up to purr,
each one a pride,
Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (…)”

“We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe”

“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.”

“Coloured people don't like. Burn it. White people don't feel good about. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.”

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. ("Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")”

“From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.”

“Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.”

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

“I have three rules to live by: Get your work done. If that doesn't work, shut up and drink your gin, and when all else fails, run like hell.”

“I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously."

[(Robert Jacobs,, February 1976)]”

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered… sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks…”

“Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but perfume to me.”

“People don't talk about anything… No, not 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.”

“I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?”

“You take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That's you [our son].”

“Will we ever stop being afraid of nights and death?

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.”

“I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.”

“I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.”

“Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.”

“It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.”

“The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.”

“Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.”

“I'd like to know what a place iswhen I'm. I'd like to be.”

“There must me something in books, things we can't imagine.”

“Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”

“I think the sun is a flower,
That blooms for just one hour.”

“It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.”

“So in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do, depending on the season and the need.”

“When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?”

“Are you happy?" she [Clarisse] said. "Am I what?" he [Montag] cried. But she was gone- running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.”

“Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.”

“Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.”

“Good to evil seems evil”

“He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.”

“There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.”

“It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.”

“A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.”

“You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead”

“You're peculiar, you're aggravating, yet you're easy to forgive. You say you're seventeen?.. How odd. How strange. And my wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at times. I can't get over it.”

“Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.”

“Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.”

“Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!”

“It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book… it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt…”

“A computer does not smell… if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.”

“Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.”

“But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority”

“He says I'm a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers.”

“The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.”