Quotes About Reflection

I don't know anything any more, he said, and let a sleep lozenge dissolve on his tongue

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. — Ray Bradbury

He walked toward the corner, thinking little at all about nothing in particular.

Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces. And now they were tampering with something more intangible--the memory; they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year.

There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.

And when he died, I suddenly realized i wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...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 people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. M

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the shared deep.

She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, Does it really belong to me? Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.

You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it.

She was too wonderful a character to be allowed to die and I realize now that I should have allowed her to appear at hte end of my book. [Ray writes about the character Clarisse]

This was all he wanted now. Some sign that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time needed to think all the things that must be thought.

Cerrando los ojos, volviendo la cabeza, escuchando. Oh que viento solitario. México es un país raro. Todo selvas y desiertos y extensiones solitarias y aquí y allí un pueblo pequeño como éste, con unaa pocas luces encendidas que puedes apagar con un castañeo de los dedos.

After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. Books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

no man's a hero to himself.

The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant. May I ask you a question? Yes. Have you ever thought you were Christ? I can't say that I have. But I have considered that God was good to me to let me find what I was looking for, if that's what you mean.

It's a lonely life, but you're used to it now, aren't you?

My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.

And what lights the sun? Its own fire. And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning. The river bobbled him along gently. Burning. The sun and every clock on the earth. It all came together and became a single thing in his mind. After a long time of floating on the land and a short time of floating in the river he knew why he must never burn again in his life.

The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in the windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters.

Have a drink? I don't need it, said Halloway. But someone inside me does. Who? The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights. But he couldn't say that. So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bons that were stacked for burning but never burned.

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 the books have to say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

A young reader finding this book today, or the day after tomorrow, is going to have to imagine first a past, and then a future that belongs to that past.

I think I begin to see where everything fell apart. The books I read, jetsam to you. Junk. Why didn't we realize that ten years back? Lots of things you don't notice when you're- he slowed- in love.