Quotes from Ray Bradbury

Se si potesse portare la mente in una lavanderia a secco, vuotare le tasche, ripulire a vapore, rimetterla in sesto e tornare a prenderla la mattina dopo. Se solo… Montag

I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books.

What does your character want, what is his dream, what shape has it, and how expressed?

Se les dio otro trabajo, el de custodios de la paz de nuestras mentes, el centro de nuestro comprensible y recto temor a ser inferiores. El bombero se transformó en censor, juez y ejecutor oficial.

I don't talk things, sir," said Faber. "I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive.

Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.

But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm, do you follow me?

How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, something real?' And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the ceiling and the limp snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes movies in their mouths when they talked. but that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so deep inside this one , and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met.

Se non ci ascolteranno, dovremo aspettare ancora. Insegneremo i libri ai nostri figli, oralmente, e i figli a loro volta li passeranno ad altri. In questo modo molto sarà perduto, è chiaro. Ma non si può costringere la gente ad ascoltare: devono arrivarci da soli, quando è il momento, e allora domandarsi cosa è successo e perché il mondo è scoppiato sotto i loro piedi. Perché così non può durare.

Nadie tiene tiempo para nadie. Usted es uno de los pocos que me han hecho caso. Por eso me parece tan raro que sea un bombero. Es algo que de algún modo no parece hecho para usted.

Creen que soy insociable. No me adapto. Es muy extraño. En el fondo, soy muy sociable. Todo depende de lo que se entienda por ser sociable, ¿no? Para mí, representa hablar de cosas como éstas. —Hizo sonar unas nueces que habían caído del árbol del patio—. O comentar lo extraño que es el mundo. Estar con la gente es agradable. Pero no considero que sea sociable reunir a un grupo de gente y, después, no dejar que hable.

We begin by beginning, I guess

Others have criticized, and they have criticized themselves, into embarrassment.

Alcune persone diventano tristi quando sono ancora terribilmente giovani. Senza una ragione specifica, a quanto pare, ma sembrano nati per questo. Si feriscono più facilmente, si stancano prima, piangono più velocemente, si ricordano tutto per più tempo e, come ho detto, diventano tristi più presto di chiunque altro al mondo. Lo so, perché sono uno di loro.

A dozen, a hundred, a thousand candles flared until it looked as if the great Andromeda star cluster had fallen out of the sky and tilted itself to rest here in the middle of almost-midnight Mexico.

You don't know what it is. Every time I'm out there I think, 'If I ever get back to Earth I'll stay there; I'll never go out again.' But I go out, and I guess I'll always go out.

So I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World's Fairs and began to write. And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

People on Earth have talked about this man for twenty centuries after he walked through the old world. We've all wanted to see him and hear him, and never had the chance. And now, today, we just missed seeing him by a few hours.

That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.

I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.

Right now I've got an awful feeling I want to smash and kill things.

I learned that I was right and everyone else wrong when I was nine.

If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere—and went. I have not so much thought my way through life as done things and found what it was and who I was after the doing. Each tale was a way of finding selves. Each self found each day slightly different from the one found twenty-four hours later.