Quotes from Ray Bradbury

A machine, now, to help boys change from peach fuzz to briar bramble, girls from toadstools to nectarine.

School busses...Won't even give us a chance to be late for school...Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare,Doug, just think it all over.

Nosotros, los habitantes de la Tierra, tenernos un talento especial para arruinar las cosas grandes y hermosas.

Remember, you're remarkable. Our whole family is odd and remarkable. We can't mix or marry with ordinary folk. We'd lose our magical powers if we did.

Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly.' I just want her to relax her grip a little bit.

Biz Dünyal?lar, büyük ve güzel ÅŸeyleri y?kmak konusunda hünerliyizdir.

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

And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman!!

He paused and tried to feel into himself to see what was really there.

Now, with the message sent, the words said, she wanted to call them back, to censor, to rearrange them, to make a prettier sentence, a fairer explanation of her soul.

I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly, she said. If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur! That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows.

Dad read the stereo-newspapers inserted into the special hat you put on your head and which turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three times in succession.

La maggior parte di noi non può correre dappertutto, parlare con chiunque, conoscere tutte le città del mondo, perché non ha il tempo, i soldi e neppure tanti amici. Le cose che cerca, Montag, sono nel mondo, ma il solo modo che l'uomo medio può conoscerle è leggendo un libro».

Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dime-store window. They stood there, unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there. 'Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!' 'Oh, my gosh!' 'Nickel tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!' 'Don't look. Maybe it's just a mirage.

Behind him the lights of the lonely little store blinked out and there was only a street light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city seemed to be going to sleep.

Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flushed him. Ice cream lived again in his throat, stomach, spine and limbs; he was instantly cold as a wind out of December gone.

one night I met up with Death's friend and didn't know it.

His destiny is in his genes. He can no more ignore this call, this summons, than he can ignore the beating of his heart. So it is with Man's becoming more than he now is. Not Superman, assuredly, for that name has been contaminated with misuse. But a creature with a superb destiny.

Then you don't care any more? I care so much I'm sick.

It smells boys ulcerating to be men, paining like great unwise wisdom teeth, twenty thousand miles away, summer abed in winter's night. It feels the aggravation of middle-aged men like myself, who gibber after long-lost August afternoons to no avail.

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.' 

The numbness will go away, he thought. It'll take time, but I'll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that's gone. I'm lost without it

And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning.

The library, then, at seven-fifteen, seven-thirty, seven-forty-five of a Sunday night, cloistered with great drifts of silence and transfixed avalanche of books poised like the cuneiform stones of eternity on shelves, so high the unseen snows of time fell all year there.