ray-bradbury

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
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I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
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You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
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Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Ray Bradbury
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If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
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Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, 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, Fahrenheit 451
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Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. 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.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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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, Dandelion Wine
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We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories  science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Ray Bradbury
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There must be something in books, something we cant imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You dont stay for nothing.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. Youve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.
Ray Bradbury
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Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.
Ray Bradbury
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We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Ray Bradbury
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I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.
Ray Bradbury
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If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
Ray Bradbury
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The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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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
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And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasnt crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. Ive never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
Ray Bradbury
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Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
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Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
Ray Bradbury
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The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.
Ray Bradbury
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We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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Love. Fall in love and stay in love.  Write only what you love, and love what you write.  The word is love.  You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
Ray Bradbury
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It was a pleasure to burn.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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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, Fahrenheit 451
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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, Fahrenheit 451
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There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
Ray Bradbury
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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, Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Ray Bradbury's Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland
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You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
Ray Bradbury
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Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."
"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball.  Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.'  I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal.  But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another.  Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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I have two rules in life - to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done.
Ray Bradbury
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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, Dandelion Wine
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Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. 
Ray Bradbury
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I hate a Roman named Status Quo!" he said to me. "Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "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. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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So few want to be rebels anymore.  And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.
Ray Bradbury
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First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
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I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You cant act if you dont know.
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
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The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
Ray Bradbury, The October Country
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The terrible tyranny of the majority.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or 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. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what i mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy.  Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.
Ray Bradbury
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Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
Ray Bradbury
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I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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Learning tolet goshould be learned before learning toget.Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. It's like boats. You keep your motor on so you can steer with the current. And when you hear the sound of the waterfall coming nearer and nearer, tidy up the boat, put on your best tie and hat, and smoke a cigar right up till the moment you go over. That's a triumph.
Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer
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Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.
Ray Bradbury
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It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Ray Bradbury
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Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
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If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get asenseof motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me, I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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