Ray Bradbury Quotes
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Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.
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The Greek philosophies teach us that we are a combination of dark and light, good and evil, and murderer and savior, hmm? And until we know this completely about ourselves we cannot love well, and we cannot forgive ourselves.
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My characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they are gone.
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Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.
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Love what you do and do what you love.
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Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.
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I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.
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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. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
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If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.
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A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?
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Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.
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Treasure this day and Treasure yourself, truly, neither will ever happen again.
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All flesh is one: what matter scores; Or color of the suit Or if the helmet glints with blue or gold? All is one bold achievement, All is fine spring-found-again-in-autumn day When juices run in antelopes along our blood, And green our flag, forever green...
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Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.
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Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.
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From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.
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Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.
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This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.
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I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the East River on an oil-slick, garbage infested midnight. I turn about on my own parentage. I inoculate against those very biles that brought me to light. I am a serum born of venoms. I am the antibody of all Time. I am the Cure. You do of the City, do you not? Manhattan is your punisher, let me be you shield.
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I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
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But no man's a hero to himself.
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I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible.
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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 heading for shore.
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All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn.