Quotes from Ray Bradbury

The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land.

Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Once upon a time! What kind of talk is that?

The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.

Well, I've kept you waiting long enough, he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself.

Quietly she wished he might one day again spend as much time holding and touching her like a little harp as he did his incredible books.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, 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. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's life away

Once in a lifetime anyway, it's nice to make a mistake if you think it'll do somebody some good, she

Mildred driving a hundred miles an hour across town, he shouting at her and she shouting back and both trying to hear what was said, but hearing only the scream of the car. At least keep it down to the minimum! he yelled. What? she cried. Keep it down to fifty-five, the minimum he shouted. The what? she shrieked. Speed! he shouted. And she pushed it up to one hundred and five miles and tore the breath from his mouth.

How's Uncle Louis today? Who? And Aunt Maude?

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ~Ray Bradbury

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

You don't ask a dream if it is real, or you wake up.

My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.

The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burned things with the firemen and the sun burned Time, that meant that everything burned!

She was beginning to shriek now, sitting there like a wax doll melting in its own heat.

So it must seem. Good to evil seems evil.

There was a damn silly bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man.

when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

the shade of the raining tree where the sky fell and was lost in autumn leaves and crept down at last in shining rivers along the branches and trunk

But what is shape? Only a cup for the blazing soul that God provides us all.

For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.

He liked to listen to the silence, he said, if silence could be listened to, for he went on, in that silence you could hear wildflower pollen sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air! Listen! the waterfall of birdsong being those trees!

And a last thought from Tom: O Mr. Moundshroud, will we EVER stop being afraid of nights and death? And the thought returned: When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.