Ray Bradbury Quotes

How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.

~ Ray Bradbury

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.

~ Ray Bradbury

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

~ Ray Bradbury

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.

~ Ray Bradbury

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There's nothing magical in them at all. Magic is only what books mean, what books say. How they stitch the patterns of the universe together into one garment for us.

~ Ray Bradbury

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine.

~ Ray Bradbury

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.

~ Ray Bradbury

See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.

~ Ray Bradbury

Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.

~ Ray Bradbury

You could see her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish - some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy, and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being nothing but colour and nothing else.

~ Ray Bradbury

The crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We're all sheep who have strayed at times. Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning, we've cried. They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts, we've shouted to ourselves.

~ Ray Bradbury

I talk. Jim runs. I tilt stones, Jim grabs the cold junk under the stones and -lickety-split! I climb hills. Jim yells off church steeples. I got a bank account. Jim’s got the hair on his head, the yell in his mouth, the shirt on his back and the tennis shoes on his feet. How come I think he’s richer?

~ Ray Bradbury

Do you know why books such as this are so important? 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 screaming past an 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.

~ Ray Bradbury

No, no, it's not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

~ Ray Bradbury

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

~ Ray Bradbury

I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview(Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six un-publishable ones. Keep typing!)

~ Ray Bradbury

I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.

~ Ray Bradbury

Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.

~ Ray Bradbury

Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

~ Ray Bradbury

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.

~ Ray Bradbury

Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows.What's it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy?Do they even know I'm HERE?

~ Ray Bradbury

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

~ Ray Bradbury

The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?

~ Ray Bradbury

Business or profession?''I guess you'd call me a writer.'No profession,' said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

~ Ray Bradbury

It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.

~ Ray Bradbury

The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.

~ Ray Bradbury

How many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? People were more often – he searched for a simile, found one in his work – torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

~ Ray Bradbury

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none... Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. 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

Do you ever wonder if--well, if there are people living on the third planet?''The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.

~ Ray Bradbury

Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?

~ Ray Bradbury

Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone ? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

~ Ray Bradbury

We lived longer but at a price. We had to be our own children, having none.

~ Ray Bradbury

They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes. Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.

~ Ray Bradbury

Raw, gentle, and easy, it mizzled out of the high air, a special elixir, tasting of spells and stars and air, carrying a peppery dust in it, and moving like a rare light sherry on his tongue. Rain.

~ Ray Bradbury

Fantasy? That's for the Fire Birds. Fantasy, even when it takes science-fictional forms, which it often does, is dangerous. It is escapist. It is daydreaming. It has nothing to do with the world and the world's problems.So said the snobs who did not know themselves as snobs.

~ Ray Bradbury

I know, i know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the times I was fort my blunt instrument has been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hid your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

~ Ray Bradbury

That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.

~ Ray Bradbury

The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.

~ Ray Bradbury

She didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.

~ Ray Bradbury

But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.

~ Ray Bradbury