Quotes from Ray Bradbury

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.

Se refería a la posibilidad de quemar libros sin cerillas ni fuego. Porque no hace falta quemar libros si el mundo empieza a llenarse de gente que no lee, que no aprende, que no sabe.

It doesn't have to be the greatest but it does have to be you.

The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow.

The great thing about growing up with science fiction is that you have an interest in everything.

Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel

Entende agora porque os livros são odiados e temidos? Eles mostram os poros no rosto da vida.

I discovered very early on that if you wanted a thing, you went for it — and you got it. Most people never go anywhere, or want anything — so they never get anything.

Sabe que los libros huelen a nuez moscada o a especias de países lejanos?

For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren't looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing!

Look for bees," said Father. "Bees hang around grapes like boys around kitchens, Doug?

And her smile showed for a moment, even as the moon came out of the clouds and went away. Isn't it silly? No. Men do the same. They take long walks when they're sixteen, seventeen. They don't stand on lawns, waiting, no. But, my God, how they walk! Miles and miles from midnight until dawn and come home exhausted and explode and die in bed.

I try to keep up with what's being done in every field, and most children's books are ten times more enjoyable than the average American novel right now.

You can only go with loves in this life.

The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so

This is the emotional thing, you see — you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

The processes we're going through are two sides of the same coin, because everything ends in mystery — the scientists have theories, and the theologians have myths, and they are both the same thing, because we end up in ignorance. … We have to think about the unthinkable, which is what religion does and science does, too.

How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists, the night of running children suddenly veered from their games and put away behind glass, behind wood, the popsicles in melting puddles of lime and strawberry where they fell when the children were scooped indoors.

It's not books you need, it is some of the things that once were in books. (...) Books were only the type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid to forget. (...) The magic is only in what books say.

Since our tongues first moved in our mouths we've asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away.

Cuando ya no hay nada que perder, se puede correr cualquier riesgo.

From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.

Look," he tried, "put two men in a rail car, one a soldier, the other a farmer. One talks war, the other wheat; and bore each other to sleep. But let one spell long-distance running, and if the other once ran the mile, why, those men will run all night like boys, sparking a friendship up from memory. So, all men have one business in common: women, and can talk that till sunrise and beyond. Hell.

They softly issued forth exhalations of air that smelled like ancient yellow beasts.