Quotes from Ray Bradbury

Why, he's the last peach, high on a summer tree.

Stage 13 was, then, a toy shop, a magic chest, a sorcerer's trunk, a trick manufactory, and an aerial hangar of dreams at the center of which Roy stood each day, waving his long piano fingers at mythic beasts to stir them, whispering, in the ten-billion-year slumbers.

Y por último, si le sirve de algo, recuérdeme como un neurótico que enloqueció un día de verano y que nunca recobró la razón. Así será más fácil para usted.

I hope we will not get too serious here, for seriousness is the Red Death if we let it move too freely amongst us. Its freedom is our prison and our defeat and death. A good idea should worry us like a dog. We should not, in turn, worry it into the grave, smother it with intellect, pontificate it into snoozing, kill it with the death of a thousand analytical slices.

It shows too much. Women are meant to be inhaled, not impaled.

Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that too. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren't many 'human beings' left to look, see, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running, jumping, there's no time to study one another. But I guess that's bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.

This is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted.

Is there a Bible chapter, I wonder? Futilities, verse four, paragraph two?' 'There will be.' 'And will I write it?' 'I have faith in you, Father!' 'Reverend!' he cried. 'Reverend,' I said.

People come to films drowned in reality, leaving behind heart failures, cancer, failed marriages, bad jobs, mean bosses, and future sickness. What they need is not happy endings, but proper endings.

No quería saber cómo se hacen las cosas sino por qué. Esto puede resultar embarazoso. Uno empieza con los porqués y termina siendo realmente desgraciado. La pobre chica está mejor muerta.

No, child. I'm old enough and cold enough; the hottest day won't thaw me

I wish I had known him, but he was just another shadow outside my screen door and I already had a sufficiency of shadows in.

I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.

My dear, when you are as old as I, they won't call you Jane, either. Old age is dreadfully formal. It's always 'Mrs. ' Young People don't like to call you 'Helen. ' It seems much too flip.

No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.

If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere—and went.

More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee.

The word on the jar was RELISH. And he was glad he had decided to live.

When Douglas walked, his mind ran, when he ran, his mind walked.

No man is as big as his own idea.

But why, Mr. Stendahl, why all this? What obsessed you?" "Bureaucracy, Mr. Garrett. But I haven't time to explain. The government will discover soon enough." He nodded to the ape. "All right. Now." The ape killed Mr. Garrett.

I'm not a serious person, and I don't like serious people.

Colored people don't like the book Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator (p. 59).

Time only works well in one direction. Back. I control the past. I'll be damned if I know what to do with the present, and to hell with the future. I'm not going to be there, don't want to go there, and would hate you if you made me. It's a perfect life.