Quotes from Ray Bradbury

Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.

The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard, reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montage. "You can't ever have my books," she said.

You should've thought of that before becoming a fireman. Thought! he said. Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can't afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I've done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep I followed them.

Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls, because they are screaming at me. I can't talk to my wife, because she listens to the walls.

If it seems I've come the long way around, perhaps I have. But I wanted to show what we all have in us, that it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice. When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange -- we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.

Spesso scivolo come un serpente su una vettura della sotterranea a sentire cosa dicono le persone. O nelle mescite di bibite dolci, e sapete che cosa ho scoperto? - - Che cosa? - - Che la gente non dice nulla. - - Oh, parlerà pure di qualche cosa, la gente! - - No, vi assicuro. Parla di una gran quantità di automobili, parla di vestiti e di piscine e dice che sono una meraviglia! Ma non fanno tutti che dire le stesse cose e nessuno dice qualcosa di diverso dagli altri. -

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.

Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky.

we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.)

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

It was a simple thing. All terror is a simplicity. (Interval In Sunlight)

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it's too late.

Sometimes I'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way?

I'm the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It's just the opposite of love.

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

Science fiction is the art of the possible not the impossible.

Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think- the pillars crumbled , you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?

All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there.

The things you are 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. Don't ask for guarantees. And 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. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Because it's good to look forward, not back. Because we need to illuminate a path we hope or we fear humanity will take. Because the world of the future seems more enticing or more interesting than the world of today. Because we need to warn you. To encourage. To examine. To imagine.)

And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world...

Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don't you, Father Stone?

I suppose it's an unconscious little stream of wit that flows quietly under everything I do or say.

Too much of anything isn't good for anyone.