Quotes from Ray Bradbury

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

I'm really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember!

Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevard?...I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly...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.

That's life for you, said MacDunn. Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.

Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it. - The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse

I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth

He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.

Can't you recognize the human in the inhuman?

Hello! He said hello and then said, What are you up to now? I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it. I don't think I'd like that, he said. You might if you tried. I never have. She licked her lips. Rain even tastes good. What do you do, go around trying everything once? he asked. Sometimes twice.

Suddenly the day was gone, night came out from under each tree and spread.

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

My gosh, if you're going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would've talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!

Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.

Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience.

I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago. For a little while I'm not afraid. Maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing at last. Maybe it's because I've done a rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you.

I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite. There!

Dad, said Will, his voice very faint. Are you a good person? To you and your mother, yes, I try. But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime, Will. I know everything worth knowing about myself- And, adding it all up...? The sum? As they come and go, and I mostly sit very still and tight, yes, I'm all right.

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.