Quotes from Ray Bradbury

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies...A child or a book or a painting or a...garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there... The difference between the man who cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching..

There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick (p. 58).

and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty. How

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.

At least you were a fool about the right things," said Faber.

It was a day to be out of bed, to pull curtains and fling open windows.It was a day to make your heart bigger with warm mounain air.

Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back.

The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain.

He ran on the white tiles up through the tunnels, ignoring the escalators, because he wanted to feel his feet move, arms swing, lungs clench, unclench, feel his throat go raw with air.

Her eyes reversed into herself, to watch the secret heart of herself pounding itself into pieces against the side of her chest.

Each of the men I have listed seized a bit of the quicksilver of life, froze it for all time and turned, in the blaze of their creativity, to point at it and cry, Isn't this good! And it was good.

The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And 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.

It was a pleasure to burn

All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another

One time, as a child in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon...

The children guessed, if they did not whisper it, that all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way. In

In most cases I don't even know the metaphors lay waiting to be printed off my retina.

I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.

And then, to the sound of death, the sound of the jets cutting the sky in two black pieces beyond the horizon, he would lie in the loft, hidden and safe, watching those strange new stars over the rim of the earth, fleeing from the soft color of dawn.

They are so confident 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 someday it'll have to hit. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.

Life should be touched, not strangled.

I have been the patient one. I have waited for the world to stop being silly. I have waited for it to stop wars. I have waited for politicians to be honest. I have waited for real estate men to be good citizens. But while I wait, I dance!

Burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes.

What ever happened to happy endings? They got them on shows at Saturday matinees. Sure, but what about life? All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That's a happy ending once a day. Next morning I'm up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I'm going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay.