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f944dfe
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Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
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Ray Bradbury |
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7f007c3
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When they give you lined paper, write the other way.
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ray-bradbury
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Ray Bradbury |
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311bc49
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Learning to should be learned before learning to Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. It's like boats. You keep your motor on so you can steer with the current. And when you hear the sound of the waterfall coming nearer and nearer, tidy up the boat, put on your best tie and hat, and smoke a cigar right up till the moment you go over. That's a triumph.
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letting-go
life
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Ray Bradbury |
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70dd2b7
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Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
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writing
construction
creative-process
destruction
writers
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Ray Bradbury |
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7b31db2
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You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You're one of the few who put up with me. That's why I think it's so strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you, somehow.
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Ray Bradbury |
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a7e2f0a
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You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
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mistakes
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Ray Bradbury |
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db0b296
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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."
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perfection
change
wisdom
fools
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Ray Bradbury |
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665261b
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I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.
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words
literature
reading
ray-bradbury
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Ray Bradbury |
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6e8b978
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That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
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ideas
creativity
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Ray Bradbury |
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d306d04
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I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.
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live-life
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Ray Bradbury |
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b3b248d
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It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness wa..
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Ray Bradbury |
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e777fda
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You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
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writing
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Ray Bradbury |
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e611d98
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A book is a loaded gun.
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Ray Bradbury |
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e5e66e0
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Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.
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sun
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Ray Bradbury |
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671b239
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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 defini..
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literature
reading
life
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Ray Bradbury |
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8493f94
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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.
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death
legacy
soul
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Ray Bradbury |
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f5d9ee6
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Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Morrocan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.
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Ray Bradbury |
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037afee
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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.
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perfection
life
something-wicked-this-way-comes
perfect
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Ray Bradbury |
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2519344
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There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked..
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Ray Bradbury |
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e4b9a9c
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It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered ..
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fire
censorship
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Ray Bradbury |
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9857dd5
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There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we're got on damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn ..
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pyre
montag
phoenix
bird
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Ray Bradbury |
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0518c5c
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Oh God, midnight's not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two's not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there's hope, for dawn's just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body's at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You're the nearest to dead you'll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death!..
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sleeplessness
night
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Ray Bradbury |
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91c8bda
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The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.
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time
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Ray Bradbury |
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c62306b
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No person ever died that had a family.
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Ray Bradbury |
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dde96e0
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Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever.
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Ray Bradbury |
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1c1ac42
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There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves
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Ray Bradbury |
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28158d8
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Everything that happens before Death is what counts.
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life
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Ray Bradbury |
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5e0ed0f
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The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
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books-reading
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Ray Bradbury |
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6be8f77
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First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.
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october
magical
halloween
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Ray Bradbury |
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9a31b2e
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Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
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plot
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Ray Bradbury |
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dadcb28
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Are you happy?
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Ray Bradbury |
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1d6993f
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We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing... It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
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Ray Bradbury |
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01fad10
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God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.
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influence
friends
friendship
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Ray Bradbury |
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21f880d
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His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.
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words
library
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Ray Bradbury |
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45b71d0
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The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
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mass-media
tv
media
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Ray Bradbury |
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4e93310
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The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats. Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpki..
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october
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Ray Bradbury |
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d5848cd
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It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you..
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Ray Bradbury |
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c9f5b9e
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And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
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writing-philosophy
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Ray Bradbury |
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09dabcc
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Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people in the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you're all to yourself that way, you're really proud of yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a phil..
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Ray Bradbury |
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1e40757
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But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.
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souls
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Ray Bradbury |
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a664f49
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Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.
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inspirational
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Ray Bradbury |
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7751d65
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What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?
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Ray Bradbury |
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230752d
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I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense.
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relationships
people
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Ray Bradbury |
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7138b29
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He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?
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inspiration
mirror-images
epiphany
children
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Ray Bradbury |