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19057cb
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I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and ..
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Ray Bradbury |
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75304f1
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I'm really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember!
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Ray Bradbury |
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da4b34b
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Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?
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lightning
nature
rain
thunder
wind
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Ray Bradbury |
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a241c09
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Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles & smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he's covering up. He's had his fun & he's guilty. And all men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors & smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit appetites..
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man
pig
sin
sty
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Ray Bradbury |
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ab3c6e4
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She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why.... Luckily, queer ones like her don't happen often.
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Ray Bradbury |
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2addab8
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That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more."
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love
pain
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Ray Bradbury |
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a4f051a
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Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds.
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life
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Ray Bradbury |
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21d0191
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They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; 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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chain-reactions
control
fear
political-bias
religious-prejudice
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Ray Bradbury |
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547cca5
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Write. Don't think. Relax.
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Ray Bradbury |
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35ae358
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The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. [...] The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.
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fall
imagery
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Ray Bradbury |
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50727b6
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Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away." "But, Lena, that's sad." "No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness."
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Ray Bradbury |
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b3be26f
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You'll find out it's little savors and little things that count more than big ones. A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car, you know why? Because it's full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing. You've time to seek and find. I know, you're after the broad effect now, I suppose that's fit and proper. But you got to look at grapes as well as watermelons. You greatly admire skeletons and I like f..
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Ray Bradbury |
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ad96e11
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But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going. Sometimes I even go to Fun parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy. Sometimes I sneak arou..
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Ray Bradbury |
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b6669a7
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The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.
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wisdom
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Ray Bradbury |
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73a6fb6
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Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevard?...I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly...If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He'd say, that's grass! A pink blur! That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows.
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Ray Bradbury |
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f3372f6
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October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at nigh..
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Ray Bradbury |
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361a4c5
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These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.
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Ray Bradbury |
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8f3e4cd
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Those who don't build must burn.
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Ray Bradbury |
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cc4c651
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I'm not anyone, I'm just myself; whatever I am, I am something, and now I'm something you can't help.
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Ray Bradbury |
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078a913
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Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it. -
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drinking
idiots
intellectuals
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Ray Bradbury |
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a0f44c1
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They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking..
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darwin
faith
freud
huxley
lost
nature
religion
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Ray Bradbury |
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f2d8c81
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Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.
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digression
philosophy
reading
wit
writing
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Ray Bradbury |
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911ba01
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For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...
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bradbury
dead
destroyed
dust
fahrinheit
jackets
knowledge
many
more
nothing
pages
person
ray
so
to
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Ray Bradbury |
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55887da
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My gosh, if you're going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would've talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!
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Ray Bradbury |
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10602ad
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We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not pratice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know. A variation of this is true for writers. No..
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Ray Bradbury |
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c69d6ab
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We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth
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truth
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Ray Bradbury |
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a8f1508
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One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying ..
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fog
loneliness
sadness
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Ray Bradbury |
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d870000
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We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where..
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Ray Bradbury |
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324cfea
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Hello!" He said hello and then said, "What are you up to now?" "I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it. "I don't think I'd like that," he said. "You might if you tried." "I never have." She licked her lips. "Rain even tastes good." "What do you do, go around trying everything once?" he asked. "Sometimes twice."
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rain
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Ray Bradbury |
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2a55aa2
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I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago. For a little while I'm not afraid. Maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing at last. Maybe it's because I've done a rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you.
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Ray Bradbury |
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27e396d
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It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.
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Ray Bradbury |
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c005ff3
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I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite. There!
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irony
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Ray Bradbury |
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1e8e1c2
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Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rare..
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Ray Bradbury |
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ee7530b
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Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. 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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bradbury
fahrenheit-451
magic
ray-bradbury
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Ray Bradbury |
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8330245
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No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.
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Ray Bradbury |
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443641a
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Dad," said Will, his voice very faint. "Are you a good person?" "To you and your mother, yes, I try. But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime, Will. I know everything worth knowing about myself-" "And, adding it all up...?" "The sum? As they come and go, and I mostly sit very still and tight, yes, I'm all right."
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Ray Bradbury |
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fb5dfdc
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And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...
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family-relationships
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Ray Bradbury |
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0b96fe8
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Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.
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Ray Bradbury |
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bb32d39
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He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.
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realization
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Ray Bradbury |
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1108923
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Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.
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inspiration
margaret-langstaff
risk
writing
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Ray Bradbury |
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28bc7d4
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There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!
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injury
population
strangers
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Ray Bradbury |
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2c49fc6
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In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
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Ray Bradbury |
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d1cd904
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The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'.
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manipulation
media
television
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Ray Bradbury |
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65693b4
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Sunsets are loved because they vanish. Flowers are loved because they go. The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart. These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.
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ray-bradbury
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Ray Bradbury |