Ray Bradbury Quotes - Page 7

From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?
Ray Bradbury
How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.
Ray Bradbury
Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.
Ray Bradbury
When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.
Ray Bradbury
Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
Ray Bradbury
Everything that happens before Death is what counts.
Ray Bradbury
Sunsets are loved because they vanish.Flowers are loved because they go.The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart.These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.
Ray Bradbury
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.
Ray Bradbury
The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don't think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now.
Ray Bradbury
We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.
Ray Bradbury
We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.
Ray Bradbury
Are you happy?
Ray Bradbury
It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.
Ray Bradbury
The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.
Ray Bradbury
We're all fools," said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly.
Ray Bradbury
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.
Ray Bradbury
I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?
Ray Bradbury
There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God's voice mingling among the crystal fires.
Ray Bradbury
We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth
Ray Bradbury
But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.
Ray Bradbury
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
Ray Bradbury
Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.
Ray Bradbury
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.
Ray Bradbury
A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
Ray Bradbury
Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.
Ray Bradbury
First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Ray Bradbury
Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.
Ray Bradbury
If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.
Ray Bradbury
That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.
Ray Bradbury
I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.
Ray Bradbury
Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.
Ray Bradbury
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.
Ray Bradbury
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Ray Bradbury
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.
Ray Bradbury
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.
Ray Bradbury
You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or 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.
Ray Bradbury