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e9e3ba2
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I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. "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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65ce3dd
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Here's how my theory goes. We writers are up to the following: We build tensions toward laughter, then give permission, and laughter comes. We build tensions toward sorrow, and at last say cry, and hope to see our audience in tears. We build tensions toward violence, light the fuse, and run. We build the strange tensions of love, where so many of the other tensions mix to be modified and transcended, and allow that fruition in the mind of t..
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Ray Bradbury |
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b751e9b
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Solntse gorit kazhdyi den'. Ono szhigaet Vremia. Vselennaia nesetsia po krugu i vertitsia vokrug svoei osi. Vremia szhigaet gody i liudei, szhigaet samo, bez pomoshchi Montega. A esli on, Monteg, vmeste s drugimi pozharnikami budet szhigat' to, chto sozdano liud'mi, a solntse budet szhigat' Vremia, to ne ostanetsia nichego. Vse sgorit. Kto-to dolzhen ostanovit'sia. Solntse ne ostanovitsia. Znachit, pokhozhe, chto ostanovit'sia dolzhen on, M..
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Ray Bradbury |
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b9ef87e
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Don't ever be a Rocket Man." I stopped. "I mean it," he said. "Because when you're out there you want to be here, and when you're here you want to be out there. Don't start that."
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Ray Bradbury |
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fb2f0d6
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Live as if you'd drop dead in 10 seconds!
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Ray Bradbury |
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b50b371
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But Clarisse's favorite subject wasn't herself. It was everyone else, and me. She was the first person in a good many years I've really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted.
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Ray Bradbury |
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87bc0a1
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This is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted.
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Ray Bradbury |
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5642e47
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No, we'll save what we can, we'll do what there is left to do. If we have to burn, Let's take a few more with us.
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Ray Bradbury |
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b660a64
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Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!
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Ray Bradbury |
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c472d17
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The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
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inspiration
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Ray Bradbury |
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63ae9e9
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I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.
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Ray Bradbury |
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b39b3ff
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Burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes.
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Ray Bradbury |
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4b24df7
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When they reached her house all its lights were blazing. What's going on? Montag had rarely seen that many house lights. Oh, just my mother father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time--did I tell you?--for being a pedestrian. Oh, we're MOST peculiar.
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Ray Bradbury |
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f76d71e
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And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her at all.
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Ray Bradbury |
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a4e1376
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Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls, because they are screaming at me. I can't talk to my wife, because she listens to the walls.
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ugly-truths
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Ray Bradbury |
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b0eb239
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So long as the vast population doesn't wander about quoting the Magna Charta and the Constitution, it's all right.
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Ray Bradbury |
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34ebc98
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The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, 'Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.
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Ray Bradbury |
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150f080
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But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.
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Ray Bradbury |
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bc98a54
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Since our tongues first moved in our mouths we've asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away.
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the-golden-apples-of-the-sun
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Ray Bradbury |
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8f8288a
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How do you get so empty? He wondered. Who takes it out of you?
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Ray Bradbury |
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6ca8b42
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But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.
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Ray Bradbury |
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befbed7
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Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.'
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Ray Bradbury |
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d11920e
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Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?
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Ray Bradbury |
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96f5f01
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It's always someone else's husband dies, they say.
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Ray Bradbury |
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edb0b24
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He liked to listen to the silence, he said, if silence could be listened to, for he went on, in that silence you could hear wildflower pollen sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air! Listen! the waterfall of birdsong being those trees!
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Ray Bradbury |
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dfdb45b
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My dear, when you are as old as I, they won't call you Jane, either. Old age is dreadfully formal. It's always 'Mrs. ' Young People don't like to call you 'Helen. ' It seems much too flip.
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Ray Bradbury |
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f7c8c7d
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The crickets were listening. The night was listening to her. For a change, all of the far summer-night meadows and close summer-night trees were suspending motion; leaf, shrub, star, and meadow grass ceased their particular tremors and were listening to Lavinia Nebbs's heart. And perhaps a thousand miles away, across locomotive-lonely country, in an empty way station, a single traveler reading a dim newspaper under a solitary naked bulb, mi..
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heartbeat
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Ray Bradbury |
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0e95979
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How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away! Did it feel as bad as having some fifty thousand books annihilated with no recompense? Yes. Yes. Stendahl felt his hands grow cold with the senseless anger.
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books
destruction
censorship
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Ray Bradbury |
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47996f1
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I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for..
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Ray Bradbury |
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35141be
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A red neon sign flickered dimly, buzzed like a dying insect, as they passed.
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street-signs
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Ray Bradbury |
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d403851
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Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies.
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Ray Bradbury |
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29f4e20
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Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel,
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Ray Bradbury |
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2603c5e
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Let us remain childlike and not childish in our 20-20 vision, borrowing such telescopes, rockets, or magic carpets as may be needed to hurry us along to miracles of physics as well as dream.
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Ray Bradbury |
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481de6e
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Bill, when you're my age, you'll find out it's the 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.
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Ray Bradbury |
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6d956f4
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The phone was laid on a desk thousands of miles away. Once more, with that clear familiarity, the footsteps, the pause, and, at last, the raising of the window. "Listen," whispered the old man to himself. And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing "La Marimba"-- oh, a lovely, dancing tune. With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cath..
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time
phone
nostalgia
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Ray Bradbury |
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f5d6037
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Colonel Freeleigh?" said Douglas softly. There was something in his silence that made them all shut up their mouths. They approached, almost on tiptoe. Douglas, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old man's now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound. Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window."
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phone-calls
windows
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Ray Bradbury |
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90b0155
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All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That's a happy ending once a day. Next morning I'm up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I'm going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything ok.
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Ray Bradbury |
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726bca3
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Second, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.
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Ray Bradbury |
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33efd27
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We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.
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Ray Bradbury |
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e685869
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For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The..
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Ray Bradbury |
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b02f323
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Young man,' she said to Bill Forrester, 'you are a person of taste and imagination. Also, you have the will power of ten men; otherwise you would not dare veer away from the common flavors listed on the menu and order, straight out, without quibble or reservation, such an unheard-of things as lime-vanilla ice.' He bowed his head solemnly to her. 'Come sit with me, both of you,' she said. 'We'll talk of strange ice creams and such things as ..
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strange-things
ice-cream
will-power
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Ray Bradbury |
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23ab876
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Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said earlier, he was a sculptor.
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Ray Bradbury |
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33d97be
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I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw..
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Ray Bradbury |
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2e6fa8f
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Have a drink?" " I don't need it," said Halloway. "But someone inside me does." "Who?" The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights. But he couldn't say that. So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bons that were stacked for burning but never burned."
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youth
alcohol
drink
regret
longing
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Ray Bradbury |