Quotes from Ray Bradbury

Oh, Dad. I never knew you. I sure know you now.

Le capitaine fait partie des pires ennemis de la vérité et de la liberté: le troupeau compact et immuable de la majorité. Oh, Dieu, la terrible tyrannie de la majorité! Nous avons tous nos harpes à faire entendre. Et c'est maintenant à vous de savoir de quelle oreille vous écouterez.

Charlie scratched inside his left ear. Everybody. The first war in history where everybody won. I can't figure it. So long. He went on up the sidewalk, crossed the front yard, opened the door of his house, waved, and was gone. There goes Charlie, said Douglas.

C'était exactement ce qu'il désirait pour l'instant. Un signe que le vaste monde l'acceptait et lui offrait le temps nécéssaire pour réfléchir à tout ce qui exigeait reflexion.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow.

He surveyed the lake of grass below, all the dandelions gone, a touch of rust in the trees, and the smell of Egypt blowing from the far east.

whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.

burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.

What - the smell of kerosene? My wife always complains,' he laughed. 'You never was it off completely.

cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. then they'll feel they're thinking , they'll get a sense of motion without moving. [...] don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. that way lies melancholy .

let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big.

I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. I put up with them when they come home three days a month; it's not bad at all. You heave them into the 'parlor' and turn the switch. It's like washing clothes; stuff laundry in and slam the lid." Mrs. Bowles tittered. "They'd just as soon kick as kiss me. Thank God, I can kick back!

But we live surrounded by paradoxes. One more shouldn't hurt us. The fact is simple enough. Through a lifetime, by ingesting food and water, we build cells, we grow, we become larger and more substantial. That which was not, is. The process is undetectable.

Yo creo que hay una verdad en todos los mundos. Y todas ellas son partes de una misma verdad. Un día todas se unirán como trozos de un gran rompecabezas.

Chacun doit laisser quelque chose derrière soi à sa mort, disait mon grand-père. Un enfant, un livre, un tableau, une maison. (...) Quelque chose que la main a touché d'une façon ou d'une autre pour que l'âme ait un endroit où aller après la mort.

Mistakes can be profited by.

At eleven that hot night everyone in Texas was awake because of the heat.

When it is a long damp November in my soul, and I think too much and perceive too little, I know it is high time to get back to that boy with the tennis shoes, the high fevers, the multitudinous joys, and the terrible nightmares. I'm not sure where he leaves off and I start.

It is good to renew one's wonder," said the philosopher. "Space travel has again made children of us all.

Well, if you are a writer, or would hope to be one, similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.

If some people didn't have something juicy to chew on, their choppers would prolapse, their souls with them.

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.

Similarly, in a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events, large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events. These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows.

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. of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when I say all this. you are intuitively right, that's what counts.