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 (via quotespile)
Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present.
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) American writer, futurist, fabulist
(via macrolit)
"So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven’t seen her for years. I can’t even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She’s safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn’t changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I’ll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I’ll swim in the lake, or I’ll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I’m in this old and ruined dragon. I’m the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming."
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Happy 100th birthday, Ray Bradbury (b. 22 August 1920)
“ When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die. ”
Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree
The One Who Waits
“We bend to the well, looking down. From the cool depths six faces peer back up at us.
One by one we bend until our balance is gone, and one by one drop into the mouth and down through cool darkness into the cold waters.”
— Ray Bradbury
Asleep in Armageddon, Ray Bradbury
When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, some day it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.
― Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance.
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
"All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe."
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine