Quotes from Ray Bradbury

But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.

Le cose che voi cercate, Montag, sono su questa terra, ma il solo modo per cui l'uomo medio potrà vederne il novantanove per cento sarà un libro.

The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile.

Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning.' He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable. 'And if you look'—she nodded at the sky—'there's a man on the moon.' He hadn't looked for a long time.

Maybe I don't have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don't we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?

Don't haggle and nag them; you were so recently of them yourself. They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won't run on. They don't know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it'll have to hit. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.

War is a bad thing, but peace can be a living horror

Death makes everything else sad. But death itself only scares. If there wasn't death, all the other things wouldn't get tainted.

It followed then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh.

Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's burnt his damn wings, he wonders why

The ideas will follow me. When they're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them.

My men are my references. They're waiting outside for the books. They're dangerous. Men like that always are.

It is not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books...take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. 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.

It doesn't think anything we don't want it to think.' 'That's sad,' said Montag, quietly, 'because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know.

I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid.

The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were. We

I was only kicking down the Christmas tree to get the star on top.

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy.

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at least one which makes the heart run over.

I don't know anything any more, he said, and let a sleep lozenge dissolve on his tongue

It doesn't have to be the greatest. It does have to be you.

Feel," said Driscoll, his hands and arms out loosely. "Remember how you used to run when you were a kid, and how the wind felt. Like feathers on your arms. You ran and thought any minute you'd fly, but you never quite did.

THERE ARE THOSE DAYS WHICH SEEM A TAKING in of breath which, held, suspends the whole earth in its waiting. Some summers refuse to end.