Top 816 Quotes & Sayings by Ray Bradbury - Page 13

For about 150 days a year in Venice, the sun doesn't show through the mist until noon.

I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.

You're either in love with what you do, or you're not in love.

And some days, he went on, were days of hearing every trump and trill of the universe. Some days were good for tasting and some for touching. And some days were good for all the senses at once. This day now, he nodded, smelled as if a great and nameless orchard had grown up overnight beyond the hills to fill the entire visible land with its warm freshness. The air felt like rain, but there were no clouds.

Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, 'Hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours.

There is more than one way to burn a book.

It could reach up and grab the moon.

We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever.

I'm not trying to PREDICT the future. I'm just trying to PREVENT it.

Halloween. Sly does it. Tiptoe catspaws. Slide and creep. But why? What for? How? Who? When! Where did it all begin? 'You don't know, do you?' asks Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud climbing out under the pile of leaves under the Halloween Tree. 'You don't really know!'

But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

Too many of us have lost the passion and emotion of the remarkable things we-ve done in space. Let us not tear up the future, but rather again heed the creative metaphors that render space travel a religious experience. When the blast of a rocket launch slams you against the wall and all the rust is shaken off your body, you will hear the great shout of the universe and the joyful crying of people who have been changed by what they-ve seen.

There where hundreds of graves. There where hundreds of women. There were hundreds of daughters. There were hundreds of sons. And hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of candles. The whole graveyard was one swarm of candleshine as if a population of fireflies had heard of a Grand Conglomeration and had flown here to settle in and flame upon the stones and light the brown faces and the dark eyes and the black hair.

"That's sad," said Montag, quietly, "because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know."

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.

You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You're one of the few who put up with me. That's why I think it's so strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you, somehow.

I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

You'll be found, your nickels, dimes and Indian-heads fused by electroplating. Abe Lincolns melted into Miss Columbias, eagles plucked raw on the backs of quarters, all run to quicksilver in your jeans. More! Any boy hit by lightning, lift his lid and there on his eyeball, pretty as the Lord's Prayer on a pin, find the last scene the boy ever saw! A box-Brownie photo, by God, of that fire climbing down the sky to blow you like a penny whistle, suck your soul back up along the bright stair!

They walked still farther and the girl said, "Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?" No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it." Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.

I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.

What are you up to now?" "I'm sill crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.

Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.

Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

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.

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

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?

When I finished [writing it], I was crying. I knew at long last, after ten years of trying, I had written something good.

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

Thinking little at all about nothing in particular.

It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know Im drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe

Digression is the soul of wit.

[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.

He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

And some day well remember so much that well build the biggest goddam steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up.

They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again: "Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Who has more pockets than a magician? A boy. Whose pockets contain *more* than a magicians? A boy's.

I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.

Are you happy?" she [Clarisse] said. "Am I what?" he [Montag] cried. But she was gone- running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.

For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is CERTAIN, that nothing bad will ever happen to ME. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there ARE. But let's not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up to you, it's too late, isn't it, Montag?

Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.

So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.

The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.

Why then you're as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust 'reality' and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

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.

Night had come on like the closing of a great but gentle eye.

The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water.... The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water.

What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.

MOTHER: Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping. Promise me, Jim. Wherever you go and come back, bring lots of kids. Let them run wild. Let me spoil them, some day. JIM: I'm never going to own anything that can hurt me.

And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over.

..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throats and refuse us the convulsion that could make us well. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.

Each person was himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid, always alone. If I should scream, if I should call for help, would anyone hear would it even matter?