01c. 1966 ADThe stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
02c. 1966 ADHow many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? People were more often – he searched for a simile, found one in his work – torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
03c. 1966 ADIf 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... 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 non-combustible 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 a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
04c. 1966 ADScience fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
05c. 1966 ADDo you ever wonder if--well, if there are people living on the third planet?''The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
06c. 1966 ADScience fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
07c. 1966 ADWhy travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
08c. 1966 ADWe earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.” – The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950)Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
09c. 1966 ADLet you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone ? 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1966 ADWe lived longer but at a price. We had to be our own children, having none.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
11c. 1966 ADThe numbness will go away, he thought. It'll take time, but I'll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that's gone. I'm lost without itRay Bradbury / quote ↗
12c. 1966 ADThey turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes. Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
13c. 1966 ADRaw, gentle, and easy, it mizzled out of the high air, a special elixir, tasting of spells and stars and air, carrying a peppery dust in it, and moving like a rare light sherry on his tongue. Rain.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
14c. 1966 ADThere were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
15c. 1966 ADFantasy? That's for the Fire Birds. Fantasy, even when it takes science-fictional forms, which it often does, is dangerous. It is escapist. It is daydreaming. It has nothing to do with the world and the world's problems.So said the snobs who did not know themselves as snobs.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
16c. 1966 ADI know, i know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the times I was fort my blunt instrument has been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hid your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
17c. 1966 ADThat's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
18c. 1966 ADI memorized all of “John Carter” and “Tarzan,” and sat on my grandparents’ front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, “Take me home!” I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
19c. 1966 ADWhen I look back now, I realize what a trial I must have been to my friends and relatives. It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. I was always yelling and running somewhere, because I was afraid life was going to be over that very afternoon.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
20c. 1966 ADThe rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
21c. 1966 ADShe didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
22c. 1966 ADBut 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 / quote ↗
23c. 1966 ADAsk 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.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
24c. 1966 ADNo sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers, and sweet autumns.Ray Bradbury / quote ↗
