Ray Bradbury Quotes

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

~ Ray Bradbury

We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing...It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

~ Ray Bradbury

Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.

~ Ray Bradbury

How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!

~ Ray Bradbury

[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.

~ Ray Bradbury

Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.

~ Ray Bradbury

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

And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.

~ Ray Bradbury

Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!

~ Ray Bradbury

The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we musn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.

~ Ray Bradbury

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

~ Ray Bradbury

So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.

~ Ray Bradbury

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

~ Ray Bradbury

In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.

~ Ray Bradbury

Strange. Half my years afraid of life. The other half, afraid of death. Always some kind of afraid.

~ Ray Bradbury

I'm afraid of them and they don't like mebecause I'm afraid.

~ Ray Bradbury

I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid.

~ Ray Bradbury

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

~ Ray Bradbury

God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.

~ Ray Bradbury

Their hands slapped library door handles together, their chests broke track tapes together, their tennis shoes beat parallel pony tracks over lawns, trimmed bushes, squirreled trees, no one losing, both winning, thus saving their friendship for other times of loss.

~ Ray Bradbury

War is a bad thing, but peace can be a living horror

~ Ray Bradbury

and sleeping put an end to summer, 1928

~ Ray Bradbury

There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished.

~ Ray Bradbury

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

~ Ray Bradbury

Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever.

~ Ray Bradbury

There was her face, like a summer peach, beautiful and warm, and the light of the candles reflected in her dark eyes. [He] held his breath. The entire world waited and held its breath.

~ Ray Bradbury

Or we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to putthings into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out ofour hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will beright. We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walksaround and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And whilenone of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'llbe me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me,out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it'sfinally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times tenthousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold on to the world tight someday. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

~ Ray Bradbury

But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.

~ Ray Bradbury

They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.

~ Ray Bradbury

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

~ Ray Bradbury

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

~ Ray Bradbury

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

~ Ray Bradbury

..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

~ Ray Bradbury

He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.

~ Ray Bradbury

We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law.

~ Ray Bradbury

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?

~ Ray Bradbury

We haven't been too bad, have we?No, nor enormously good. I suppose that's the trouble - we haven't been much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of awful things.

~ Ray Bradbury

I was a crazy creature with a head full of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my: fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend.

~ Ray Bradbury

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 headed for shore.

~ Ray Bradbury

Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?

~ Ray Bradbury