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d5cbfad
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Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending." "Snap ending." Mildred nodded. "Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, o..
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Ray Bradbury |
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7ee7ecc
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Goodnight!" She started her walk. Then she seemed to remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. "Are you happy?" she said? "Am I what?" he cried. But she was gone - running in the moonlight. Her Front door shut gently."
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Ray Bradbury |
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bacffbd
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Once you kill all of us, and you're alone, you'll die! The hate will die. That hate is what moves you, nothing else! That envy moves you. Nothing else! You'll die, inevitably. You're not immortal. You're not even alive, you're nothing but moving hate.
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hate
death
die
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Ray Bradbury |
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299b53e
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I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.
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writing-life
success
perserverance
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Ray Bradbury |
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571babc
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Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn't to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It's easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you've made an enemy. Then, of cou..
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time
telephones
phones
technology
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Ray Bradbury |
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262dce1
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I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn't stand most men shuffling along with all the iron of the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds.
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people
life
lightness
weight
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Ray Bradbury |
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b014b6a
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Let me alone, said Mildred. I didn't do anything. 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?
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Ray Bradbury |
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c703bb0
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Nimeni nu mai are timp si pentru ceilalti.
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Ray Bradbury |
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e41916b
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If there were no war, if there was peace in the world, I'd say fine, have fun! But, Montag, you mustn't go back to being just a fireman. All isn't well with the world.
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Ray Bradbury |
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d57b5b8
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Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry rot and men with matches.
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Ray Bradbury |
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3d4e865
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This is the kind of life I've had. Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle, as an Irish police report once put it. Drunk with life, that is, and not knowing where off to next. But you're on your way before dawn. And the trip? Exactly one half terror, exactly one half exhilaration.
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Ray Bradbury |
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7bb6fd7
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The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.
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Ray Bradbury |
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2a42e47
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I suppose it's an unconscious little stream of wit that flows quietly under everything I do or say.
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Ray Bradbury |
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07d8b25
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Los libros estan para recordarnos lo tontos y estupidos que fuimos.
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Ray Bradbury |
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a6cf4bc
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And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.
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Ray Bradbury |
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fa8664f
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All down the way the pursued and the pursuing, the dream and the dreamers, the quarry and the hounds. All down the way the sudden revealment, the flash of familiar eyes, the cry of an old, old name. Everyone leaping forward as, like an image reflected from ten thousand mirrors, ten thousand eyes, the running dream came and went, a different face to those ahead, those behind, those yet to be met, those unseen... And here they all are now, at..
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Ray Bradbury |
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9e12769
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Isn't this a nice time of night to walk? 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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sleeplessness
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Ray Bradbury |
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dbe5dbc
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The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?
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life
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Ray Bradbury |
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1531d5e
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I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another.
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Ray Bradbury |
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067291c
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For the first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it would be better for his health.
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Ray Bradbury |
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68af107
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most men jump at the chance to give up everything for nothing. There's nothing we're so slapstick with as our own immortal souls.
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Ray Bradbury |
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0ff765a
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Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air! So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 2006; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose--oh, what a wailing!--and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who live..
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fairy-tales
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Ray Bradbury |
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b482cca
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But, stop and think. What does the word 'witch' truly mean?" "Why--" said Tom, and was stymied. "Wits," said Moundshroud. "Intelligence. That's all it means. Knowledge. So any man, or woman, with half a brain and with inclinations toward learning had his wits about him, eh? And so, anyone too smart, who didn't watch out, was called--" "A witch!" said everyone. "And some of the smart ones, the ones with wits, pretended at magic, or dreamed t..
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Ray Bradbury |
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a6f1ce5
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The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary b..
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Ray Bradbury |
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8bb2841
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The multicolored or grey lights touching their faces, but never really touching them...
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Ray Bradbury |
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20aba22
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Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.
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Ray Bradbury |
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27261a3
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No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers, and sweet autumns.
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echoes
made
recapture
summers
truly
clouds
once
sound
electric
wars
long
forgotten
sweet
trapped
sad
lost
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Ray Bradbury |
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9a46e8f
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But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.
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life
perserverence
fahrenheit-451
life-goes-on
ray-bradbury
mgg
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Ray Bradbury |
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9c48dfd
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I'll tell you," said Beatty, smiling at his cards. "That made you for a little while a drunkard. Read a few lines and off you go over the cliff. Bang, you're ready to blow up the world, chop off heads, knock down women and children, destroy authority. I know. I've been through it all."
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Ray Bradbury |
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c2a6ede
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The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.
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Ray Bradbury |
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b81ad50
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Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.
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thoughts
quiet
summer
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Ray Bradbury |
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f5c76c2
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God bless the lawn mower, he thought. Who was the fool who made January first New Year's Day? No, they should set a man to watch the grasses across a million Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa lawns, and on that morning when it was long enough for cutting, instead of ratchets and horns and yelling, there should be a great swelling symphony of lawn mowers reaping fresh grass upon the prairie lands. Instead of confetti and serpentine, people should thr..
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philosophical
lawnmower
new-year-s-day
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Ray Bradbury |
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9e1cd15
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The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.
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Ray Bradbury |
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12e33d7
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The odors of perfume were fanned out on the summer air by the whirling vents of the grottoes where the women hid like undersea creatures, under electric cones, their hair curled into wild whorls and peaks, their eyes shrewd and glassy, animal and sly, their mouths painted a neon red.
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women
hairstyles
hairstyling
salons
make-up
perfume
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Ray Bradbury |
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7b2952e
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Who wants to see the Future, who does? A man can face the Past, but to think- the pillars , you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?
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Ray Bradbury |
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be67685
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Men are men, unfortunately, no matter what their shape, and inclined to sin.
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truth
ray-bradbury
sin
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Ray Bradbury |
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332a21f
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After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. // Pictures? No, they lie. You're not the picture. My dear, you're not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You're not these trunks of junk and dust. You're only you, here, now--the present you.
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Ray Bradbury |
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236bb10
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Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.
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Ray Bradbury |
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8dda2bd
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Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
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writing
life
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Ray Bradbury |
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a1b2333
|
He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosp..
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waiting
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Ray Bradbury |
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68ae049
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When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits. Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real. Make haste to live.
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Ray Bradbury |
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08c6762
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We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.
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Ray Bradbury |
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7304c88
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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... The good writers touch life often.
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Ray Bradbury |
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8b5cecd
|
Cica sunt antisociala. Nu ma integrez. E foarte bizar. De fapt, sunt o fiinta foarte sociabila. Totul depinde de ceea ce intelegi prin sociabil, nu? Pentru mine sociabil inseamna sa discut cu tine despre astfel de lucruri. Sau sa vorbesc despre cat de ciudata este lumea. E placut sa fii cu oameni. Dar nu cred ca sociabil inseamna sa aduni la un loc un grup de persoane si sa nu le dai voie sa vorbeasca, n-am dreptate? O ora de televiziune, o..
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Ray Bradbury |