Ray Bradbury idézet

oldal 11

„Kockázatban élni annyi, mint leugrani a szikláról, és a lefelé vezető úton szárnyakat építeni.”

„Részegnek kell maradnod az írástól, hogy a valóság ne tudjon tönkretenni.”

„Élj úgy, mintha tíz másodperc múlva holtan esnél össze.”

„Menj a szakadék szélére, és ugorj le. A lefelé vezető úton építsd fel a szárnyaidat.”

„Könyvtár nélkül nincs civilizáció.”

„Nem kell könyveket elégetni ahhoz, hogy elpusztítsunk egy kultúrát. Elég, ha az emberek nem olvassák őket többé.”

“When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life — that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.”

“Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye.”

“Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.”

“We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe…. If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal.”

“The news is all rapes and murders we didn't commit, funerals we don't attend, AIDS we don't want to catch. All crammed into a quarter of a minute! But at least we still have a hand with which to switch channels or turn off altogether. I tell my lecture audiences to never, ever watch local TV news.”

“A life's work should be based on love.”

“All floated upon an evening carrousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely haunted by television.”

“Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine.
“I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.”

“Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.”

“Recreate the world in your own image and make it better for your having been here.”

“Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery. … If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past — a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic.”

“The gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.”

“It will only take a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
“I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”

“Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.”

“I’ve alway known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It’s essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don’t know.”

“We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.”

“I write fantasy. The only science fiction I have written is Fahrenheit 451. It's the art of the possible. Science fiction is the art of the possible. It could happen. It has happened.”

“Will sensed a stir in Jim's house; Jim, too, with his fine dark antennae, must have felt the waters part high over town to let a Leviathan pass.”

“No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”

“On the whole, the change had done Huxley a share of good. Death made him a handsomer man to deal with. You could talk to him now and he’d have to listen.”

““Oh,” said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. “A man with wings.”
That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him.”

“Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.”

“The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.”

“Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid.”

“All the sadder that Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past.”

“You should read in your own field only when you're young. When I was 8, 10, 12, 16, 25, I read science fiction. But then I went on to Alexander Pope and John Donne and Moliere to mix it up.”

“All silence is.
All emptiness.
And now:
The dawn.”

“Most of the writers I know in any field, especially science fiction, grew up late. They're so interested in doing what they do and in their science, they don't think about other things.”

“The sun did not rise, it overflowed.”