Quotes from Ray Bradbury

With nothing trembles. To be afraid of nothing for no reason. And having to live with that nothing until dawn.

Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh?' ... There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm.

The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

No to write, for many of us, is to die.

The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

If there were no war, if there was peace in the world, I'd say fine, have fun! But, Montag, you mustn't go back to being just a fireman. All isn't well with the world.

Let me alone, said Mildred Let you alone! He almost cried out with laughter. Letting you alone is easy, but how can I leave myself alone? That's what's wrong. We need not to be let alone. We need to be upset and stirred and bothered, once in a while, anyway. Nobody bothers anymore. Nobody thinks. Let a baby alone, why don't you? What would you have in twenty years? A savage, unable to think or talk--like us!

Kill two birds with one stone, feed the homeless to the hungry.

Someone who loved night arrivals and dark departures, for the hell, the fun, the death of it?

We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion.

The sun rose yellow as a lemon. The sky was round and blue. The birds looped clear water songs in the air. Will and Jim leaned from their windows. Nothing had changed. Except the look in Jim's eyes. Last night. . . said Will. Did or didn't it happen?

And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry 'Curiouser and curiouser,' and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away!

Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.

Life is trying things to see if they work.

It's the way God runs the world. Tom thought about this for a moment. He's all right, Doug, said Tom. He tries.

The entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can't have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

The things you're looking for...are in the world, but the only way the average chap will see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.

There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light.

Don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

All down the way the pursued and the pursuing, the dream and the dreamers, the quarry and the hounds. All down the way the sudden revealment, the flash of familiar eyes, the cry of an old, old name. Everyone leaping forward as, like an image reflected from ten thousand mirrors, ten thousand eyes, the running dream came and went, a different face to those ahead, those behind, those yet to be met, those unseen... And here they all are now, at the boat, wanting the dream for their own.

I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly, she said. If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose-garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?

There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.