Ray Bradbury Quotes

...trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound.

Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

“It will only take a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife. “I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

There where hundreds of graves. There where hundreds of women. There were hundreds of daughters. There were hundreds of sons. And hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of candles. The whole graveyard was one swarm of candleshine as if a population of fireflies had heard of a Grand Conglomeration and had flown here to settle in and flame upon the stones and light the brown faces and the dark eyes and the black hair.

Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.

Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.

"Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett."

We could have built a colony on the moon and moved on to Mars. We need something larger than ourselves — that's a real religious activity. That's what space travel can be — relating ourselves to the universe. … NASA is to blame — the entire government is to blame — and the end of the Cold War really pulled the plug, draining any passion that remained.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.

Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

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.