Quotes from Ray Bradbury

We can't be good unless we know what bad is, and it's a shame we're working against time.

I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less.

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.

And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.

They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds…. … Now Tomas laughed. "You're blind!" "I see very well. You are the one who does not see.

I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.

The form does not matter. Content is everything.

I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

I feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and I don't know what.

But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime. I know everything worth knowing about myself-- ~Something Wicked This Way Comes

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.   So vague, yet so immense. He did not want to live with it. Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it all the rest of his life.

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.

We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.

I've tasted every victual and danced every dance; now there's one last tart I haven't bit on, one time I haven't whistled. but I'm not afraid. I'm truly curious. Death won't get a crumb by my mouth I won't keep and savor. So don't you worry over me. Now, all of you go, and let me find my sleep....

I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eyes with wonder, ' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.

Don't they get afraid, then? They have a religion for that.

This is happening to me, said Montag. What a dreadful surprise, said Beatty. For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are. But let's not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up with you, it's too late, isn't it, Montag?

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

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 jersey's are they reading as they trot out to the feild?