I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you'… - Ray Bradbury

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Engraved portrait of Ray Bradbury, facing left

I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

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About Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury (22 August 1920 – 5 June 2012) was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons, Alan Light (CC BY)

Also Known As

Pen Names: William Elliot
Birth Name: Raymond Douglas Bradbury
Native Name: Ray Douglas Bradbury
Alternative Names: Elliott, William William Elliott

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Additional quotes by Ray Bradbury

It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.

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When I was a boy in the midwest I used to go out and look at the stars at night and wonder about them.

I guess every boy does that.

When I wasn't looking at the stars, I was running in the my old or my brand-new tennis shoes, on my way to swing in a tree, swim in a lake, or delve in the town library to read about dinosaurs or time machines.

I guess every boy has done that, too.

This is a book about those stars and those tennis shoes. Mainly about the stars, beacuse that is the way I grew up, getting more and more involved with rockets and space as I moved toward my twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years.

Not that I have forgotten the tennis shoes and their powerful magic, as you will see in the last story here, which I have included not because it concerns the future, but because it gives you some sort of idea of the kind of boy I was when I was looking at the stars and thinking of the years ahead.

Nor have I forgetten the dinosaurs that all boys love; they are here, too, along with a machine that travels back in time to step on a butterfly.

This is a book then by a boy who grew up in a small illinois town and lived to see the space age arrive, as he hoped and dreamt it would.

I dedicate these stories to all boys who wonder about the past, run swiftly in the present, and have high hopes for our future.

The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.

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