Quotes from Ray Bradbury

The wind whistled, was cool: it was an early autumn evening, no longer a late summer one.

Be your own self. Love what YOU love.

I want to wake people up and make them care about being alive in this universe.

You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.

He almost turned back to make the walk again, to give her time to appear. He was certain if he tried the same route, everything would work out fine.

Nothing ever likes to die — even a room.

The voice clock mourned out the cold hour of a cold morning of a still colder year.

To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that. But what else. What else? Something, something . . . And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another.

Grow up and you turn into burglars and get shot, or worse, they make you wear a coat and tie and stash you in the First National Bank behind brass bars! We gotta stand still! Stay the age we are. Grow up? Hah! All you do then is marry someone who screams at you!

They run amuck; I let them. Pride of lions in the yard. Stare and they burn a hole in your retina. A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion.

Go Panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep. Not smash and grab, but rather find and keep; Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep To detonate the hidden seeds with stealth So in your wake a weltering dream of wealth Springs up unseen, ignored and left behind As you sneak on, pretending to be blind.

We salt our lives with other people's sins.

The crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We're all sheep who have strayed at times. Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning, we've cried. They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts, we've shouted to ourselves.

And what lights the sun? Its own fire. And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning. The river bobbled him along gently. Burning. The sun and every clock on the earth. It all came together and became a single thing in his mind. After a long time of floating on the land and a short time of floating in the river he knew why he must never burn again in his life.

The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in the windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters.

The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.

Have a drink? I don't need it, said Halloway. But someone inside me does. Who? The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights. But he couldn't say that. So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bons that were stacked for burning but never burned.

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. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen.

I leave you gifts of Fate most secret; find no other's Fate, For if you do, no grave is deep enough for your despair No countryfar enough to hide your loss.

When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people.

We theorize about what goes on in the brain, but it is mostly undiscovered country. A writer's work is to coax the stuff out and see how it plays. Surprise, as I have often said, is everything.

AT DAWN, a juggernaut of thunder wheeled over the stony heavens in a spark-throwing tumult. Rain fell softly on town cupolas, chuckled from rainspouts, and spoke in strange subterranean tongues beneath the windows where Jim and Will knew fitful dreams, slipping out of one, trying another for size, but finding all cut from the same dark, mouldered cloth.

Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering.