Ray Bradbury Quotes

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

~ Ray Bradbury

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 heading for shore.

~ Ray Bradbury

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

~ Ray Bradbury

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

~ Ray Bradbury

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.

~ Ray Bradbury

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.

~ Ray Bradbury

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

~ Ray Bradbury

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

~ Ray Bradbury

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.

~ Ray Bradbury

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.

~ Ray Bradbury

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

~ Ray Bradbury

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

~ Ray Bradbury

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

~ Ray Bradbury

There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God's voice mingling among the crystal fires.

~ Ray Bradbury

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

~ Ray Bradbury

The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant. May I ask you a question?Yes.Have you ever thought you were Christ?I can't say that I have. But I have considered that God was good to me to let me find what I was looking for, if that's what you mean.

~ Ray Bradbury

The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.

~ Ray Bradbury

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

~ Ray Bradbury

Are you happy?

~ Ray Bradbury

The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don't think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now.

~ Ray Bradbury

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

~ Ray Bradbury

Sunsets are loved because they vanish.Flowers are loved because they go.The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart.These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.

~ Ray Bradbury

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

~ Ray Bradbury

Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

~ Ray Bradbury

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

~ Ray Bradbury

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

~ Ray Bradbury

How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.

~ Ray Bradbury

From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?

~ Ray Bradbury

The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it.

~ Ray Bradbury

Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't die, that's what they say, can't die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmere who only whispers, and now they're coming and I'm nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be the one! If they live forever, why not me?

~ Ray Bradbury

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...

~ Ray Bradbury

And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world...

~ Ray Bradbury

I take this continent with me into the grave.

~ Ray Bradbury

They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.

~ Ray Bradbury

- Padre Peregrine, non ti comporterai mai con un po' di serietà?- No, finché il nostro Signore benedetto non farà altrettanto. Ti prego, non fare quella faccia così terribilmente scandalizzata! Il Signore non è mai troppo serio. In effetti, è difficile dire che cos'altro sia, oltre a infinito amore. E l’amore più puro è anche letizia, non ti sembra? Non puoi amare nessuno, senza andare d’accordo con lui, e non puoi andare d’accordo con chiunque in qualunque momento, a meno di non ridere di lui bonariamente. E’ vero o no? Senza dubbio noi somigliamo a buffi animaletti che si rivoltano nella coppa della marmellata, e Dio deve amarci tanto più in quanto risvegliamo il Suo senso umoristico.

~ Ray Bradbury

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

~ Ray Bradbury

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

~ Ray Bradbury

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

~ Ray Bradbury

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

~ Ray Bradbury

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

~ Ray Bradbury