Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

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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
I feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and I don't know what.

Ray Bradbury
Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

Ray Bradbury
He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

Ray Bradbury
But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority

Ray Bradbury
I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well and good.

Ray Bradbury
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

Ray Bradbury
I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense.

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

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

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
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
That's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and WORTH the doing.

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

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
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
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
Stuff your eyes with wonder... live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Ray Bradbury
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.

Ray Bradbury
We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.

Ray Bradbury
To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes.

Ray Bradbury
You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

Ray Bradbury
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.

Ray Bradbury
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.

Ray Bradbury
We're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.

Ray Bradbury
I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.

Ray Bradbury
I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

Ray Bradbury