Quotes from Ray Bradbury

Salta, y deja que te crezcan alas en el camino hacia abajo.

The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?

I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?

Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.

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!)

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

If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.

The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free. - Green Shadows, White Whale

Goodnight! She started her walk. Then she seemed to remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. Are you happy? she said? Am I what? he cried. But she was gone - running in the moonlight. Her Front door shut gently.

Her cheeks glowed with pink charcoals.

I don't belong with you. I've been an idiot all the way

She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing.

The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm.

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

August was almost over. The first cool touch of autumn moved slowly through the town and there was a softening and the first gradual burning fever of color in every tree, a faint flush and coloring in the hills, and the color of lions in the wheat fields. Now the pattern of days was familiar and repeated like a penman beautifully inscribing again and again, in practice, a series of it's and w's and m's, day after day the line repeated in delicate rills.

Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.

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?

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house, there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why I feel like I'm putting on weight, I feel fat. I feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and don't konw what. I might even start reading books.

He had written books of a lifetime, on the airs of vast rooms in vast buildings, and had it all fly out the vents.

Nimeni nu mai are timp ?i pentru ceilal?i.

Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry rot and men with matches.

This is the kind of life I've had. Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle, as an Irish police report once put it. Drunk with life, that is, and not knowing where off to next. But you're on your way before dawn. And the trip? Exactly one half terror, exactly one half exhilaration.

The odors of perfume were fanned out on the summer air by the whirling vents of the grottoes where the women hid like undersea creatures, under electric cones, their hair curled into wild whorls and peaks, their eyes shrewd and glassy, animal and sly, their mouths painted a neon red.

don't face a problem, burn it.