Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry. - Ray Bradbury

Q: What would you put on your suggested reading list? RB: All the plays of George Bernard Shaw. I go back to Shakespeare constantly. I go back to the great poets. And there are a lot of women in my life. Edith Wharton has been part of my life for at least 45 years, and she’s been discovered in the last few years because of The Age of Innocence. Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, these are all very important women writers. And then you pick up the short stories of Steinbeck and Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald is certainly our greatest American writer in the last 60 years.

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.

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.