Ray Bradbury Quotes
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I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.
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A day without writing was a little death.
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Thus through half-belief, we are often doomed to repeat that very past we should have learned from.
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Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there was it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away.
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Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.
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We're going to become the martians when we land there. When we explore and build communities, we become the martians. That's a wonderful destiny for all of us.
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What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?
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We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.
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Those women like to see their tongues dance.
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Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.
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It was a pleasure to burn.
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For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule.
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One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more.
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And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over.
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The real fear isn't rejection, but that there won't be enough time in your life to write all the stories that you have in you.
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Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action?
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You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.
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If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.
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Those who don't build must burn.
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But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.
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I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.
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You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
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Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.
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Go out and make your own speeches. People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, "Hey, we got a crazy man in the community," and they'll begin talking to you.