Ray Bradbury Quotes - Page 3

Are you happy?

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.

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

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . 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.

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.

Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.

The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we've done fine tonight. Even Death can't spoil it.

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...

And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world...

I take this continent with me into the grave.

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant.

"May I ask you a question?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever thought you were Christ?"

"I can't say that I have. But I have considered that God was good to me to let me find what I was looking for, if that's what you mean.

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the shared deep.

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

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.

The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.