Ray Bradbury Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered...sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks...

Ray Bradbury
Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet."

Ray Bradbury
I just can't imagine being in a world and not being fascinated with what ideas are doing to us.

Ray Bradbury
Christ is one of the 'family' now. I often wonder if God recognizes his own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine - when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that ever worshiper absolutely needs.

Ray Bradbury
I'm really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember!

Ray Bradbury
The whole concept of higher education is negated unless the sole criterion used to determine if students qualify is the grades they score on standardized tests. Education is purely an issue of learning - we can no longer afford to have it polluted by damn politics. Leave pollution up to the politicians

Ray Bradbury
The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.

Ray Bradbury
I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

Ray Bradbury
When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!—when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?

Ray Bradbury
The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.

Ray Bradbury
As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn't quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.

Ray Bradbury
So in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do, depending on the season and the need.

Ray Bradbury
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.

Ray Bradbury
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...

Ray Bradbury
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?

Ray Bradbury
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

Ray Bradbury
It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

Ray Bradbury
Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings,
In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.

Ray Bradbury
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 pressures; 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.

Ray Bradbury
I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it's really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us.

Ray Bradbury