Ray Bradbury Quotes

353 Sourced Quotes

Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.

Ray Bradbury
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.... Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

Ray Bradbury
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!

Ray Bradbury
War!
The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs where other people lived.
But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting and killing?

Ray Bradbury
Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."

Ray Bradbury
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.

Ray Bradbury
My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Ray Bradbury
Remember the firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord.

Ray Bradbury
Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.

Ray Bradbury
All floated upon an evening carrousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely haunted by television.

Ray Bradbury
People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

Ray Bradbury
Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

Ray Bradbury
Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Ray Bradbury
I don't understand writers who have to work at it. I like to play. I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.

Ray Bradbury
Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

Ray Bradbury
Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

Ray Bradbury
Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Ray Bradbury
I have never had a dry spell in my life because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Ray Bradbury
Suddenly the day was gone, night came out from under each tree and spread.

Ray Bradbury
Who has more pockets than a magician? A boy. Whose pockets contain *more* than a magicians? A boy's.

Ray Bradbury
When I was 16, I saw six people die horribly in an accident. I walked home holding on to walls and trees. It took me months to begin to function again. So I don't drive. But whether I drive or not is irrelevant. The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society — cars kill more than wars do. More than 50,000 people will die this year because of them and nobody seems to notice.

Ray Bradbury
It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know Im drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe

Ray Bradbury
Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.

Ray Bradbury
I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.

Ray Bradbury
So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.

Ray Bradbury
He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

Ray Bradbury
But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Ray Bradbury
All flesh is one: what matter scores;
Or color of the suit
Or if the helmet glints with blue or gold?
All is one bold achievement,
All is fine spring-found-again-in-autumn day
When juices run in antelopes along our blood, And green our flag, forever green…

Ray Bradbury
A single face turned upward toward all Time
One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.

Ray Bradbury
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.

Ray Bradbury