Quotes from Ray Bradbury

I want your loves to be multiple. I don't want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it.

The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.

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.

The multicolored or grey lights touching their faces, but never really touching them...

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!

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

The girl who had known the weather and never been burnt by fireflies, the girl who had known what dandelions meant rubbed off on your chin. Then, she would be gone.

After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. // Pictures? No, they lie. You're not the picture. My dear, you're not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You're not these trunks of junk and dust. You're only you, here, now—the present you.

When I hit the atmosphere, I'll burn like a meteor. "I wonder," he said, "if anyone'll see me?" The small boy on a country road looked up and screamed. "Look, Mom, look! A falling star!" The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois. "Make a wish," said his mother. "Make a wish.

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?

My feet, said Montag. I can't move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet won't move! Listen. Easy now, said the old man gently. I know, I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much?

The Lord is not serious. In fact, it is a little hard to know just what else He is except loving. And love has to do with humor, doesn't it? For you cannot love someone unless you put up with him, can you? And you cannot put up with someone constantly unless you can laugh at him. Isn't that true?

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.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

Once you kill all of us, and you're alone, you'll die! The hate will die. That hate is what moves you, nothing else! That envy moves you. Nothing else! You'll die, inevitably. You're not immortal. You're not even alive, you're nothing but moving hate.

So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment.

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.

Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it... Where did I find the courage to rebel, to change my life, live alone? I don't want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was.

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy,Something's missing!

He smelled of moon swamps and old Egyptian bandages. He was something found in museums, wrapped in nicotine linens, sealed in glass. But he was alive, puling like a babe, and shriveling unto death, fast, very fast, before their eyes.

He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid.

It wasn't going places. It was being between...Mostly it was space. So much space. I liked the idea of nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, and a lot of nothing in between, and me in the middle of the nothing.