Ray Bradbury Quotes

He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting?He turned the corner.

~ Ray Bradbury

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

~ Ray Bradbury

And they left the mellow light of the dandelion wine and went upstairs to carry out the last few rituals of summer, for they felt that now the final day, the final night had come. As the day grew late they realized that for two or three nights now, porches had emptied early of their inhabitants. The air hard a different, drier smell and Grandma was talking of hot coffee instead of iced tea; the open, white-flutter-curtained windows were closing in the great bays; cold cuts were giving way to steamed beef. The mosquitos were gone from the porch, and surely when they abandoned the conflict the war with Time was really done, there was nothing for it but that humans also forsake the battleground.

~ Ray Bradbury

June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past. And if he should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the cellar, numbered huge for each and every day. He would go there often, stare straight into the sun until he could stare no more, then close his eyes and consider the burned spots, the fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids; arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear...So thinking, he slept.And, sleeping, put an end to Summer, 1928.

~ Ray Bradbury

The mosquitos were gone from the porch, and surely when they abandoned the conflict the war with Time was really done, there was nothing for it but that humans also forsake the battleground.

~ Ray Bradbury

The sidewalks were haunted by dustghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up,swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice onthe lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strol-lers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed avolcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes every-where, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritabledogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spon-taneous combustion at three in the morning.Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element forelement. Air ran like hot spring waters nowhere, with nosound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serenevapors. Tar was poured licorice in the streets, red bricks werebrass and gold, roof tops were paved with bronze. The high-tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threatabove the unslept houses. The cicadas sang louder and yet louder. The sun did not rise, it overflowed.

~ Ray Bradbury

But no man's a hero to himself.

~ Ray Bradbury

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves -- you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

~ Ray Bradbury

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

~ Ray Bradbury

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?

~ Ray Bradbury

That's what I want, a mental evidence I can feel. I don't want physical evidence, proof you have to go out and drag in. I want evidence that you can carry in your mind and always touch and smell and feel. But there's no way to do that. In order to believe in a thing you've got to carry it with you. You can't carry the Earth, or a man, in your pocket. I want a way to do that, carry things with me always, so I can believe in them. How clumsy to have to go to all the trouble of going out and bringing in something terribly physical to prove something. I hate physical things because they can be left behind and become impossible to believe in them.

~ Ray Bradbury

Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

~ Ray Bradbury

There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree.

~ Ray Bradbury

...trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound.

~ Ray Bradbury

Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.

~ Ray Bradbury

They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they're fascinated with the snake-pit.

~ Ray Bradbury

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.

~ Ray Bradbury

Four days, eight days, twelve days passed, and he was invited to teas, to suppers, to lunches. They sat talking through the long green afternoons - they talked of art, of literature, of life, of society and politics. They ate ice creams and squabs and drank good wines.

~ Ray Bradbury

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.

~ Ray Bradbury

You can't try to do things you simply must do them.

~ Ray Bradbury

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 noncombustible 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

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

~ Ray Bradbury

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

~ Ray Bradbury

If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you.

~ Ray Bradbury

I'm never going to go to Mars, but I've helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

~ Ray Bradbury

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

~ Ray Bradbury

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

~ Ray Bradbury

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

~ Ray Bradbury

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

~ Ray Bradbury

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

~ Ray Bradbury

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

~ Ray Bradbury

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

~ Ray Bradbury

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

~ Ray Bradbury

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

~ Ray Bradbury

We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

~ Ray Bradbury

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

~ Ray Bradbury

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

~ Ray Bradbury

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

~ Ray Bradbury

We've gotta reinvest in space travel. We should've never left the moon.

~ Ray Bradbury

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

~ Ray Bradbury