Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won’t run on. They don’t know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it’ll have to hit.”

— Ray Bradbury

452. “Can’t you recognize the human in the inhuman?”

— Ray Bradbury

453. “Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt.”

— Ray Bradbury

454. “Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.”

— Ray Bradbury

455. “It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.”

— Ray Bradbury

456. “Touch a scientist and you touch a child.”

— Ray Bradbury

457. “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

458. “We meet on the common ground of an uncommon age and share out our gifts of dark and light, good and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow.”

— Ray Bradbury

459. “Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.”

— Ray Bradbury

460. “Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.”

— Ray Bradbury

461. “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

462. “How’s Uncle Louis today?” “Who?” “And Aunt Maude?”

— Ray Bradbury

463. “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

464. “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

465. “And suddenly everything, absolutely everything, was there.”

— Ray Bradbury

466. “I was only kicking down the Christmas tree to get the star on top.”

— Ray Bradbury

467. “I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.”

— Ray Bradbury

468. “Writing is like sex. You have to save your love for the love object. If you go around spouting about your idea, there’ll be no “charge” left. You can’t father children that way.”

— Ray Bradbury

469. “Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.”

— Ray Bradbury

470. “Each person was himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid, always alone. If I should scream, if I should call for help, would anyone hear would it even matter?”

— Ray Bradbury

471. “The Greek philosophies teach us that we are a combination of dark and light, good and evil, and murderer and savior, hmm? And until we know this completely about ourselves we cannot love well, and we cannot forgive ourselves.”

— Ray Bradbury

472. “Let me alone, said Mildred. I didn’t do anything. Let 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

473. “My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn’t kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility, my uncle says.”

— Ray Bradbury

474. “I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.”

— Ray Bradbury

475. “I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That’s immortality. That’s the only immortality I care about.”

— Ray Bradbury

476. “This was all he wanted now. Some signs that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time he needed to think all the things that must be thought.”

— Ray Bradbury

477. “Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity.”

— Ray Bradbury

478. “August was almost over. The first cool touch of autumn moved slowly through the town and there was a softening and the first gradual burning fever of color in every tree, a faint flush and coloring in the hills, and the color of lions in the wheat fields. Now the pattern of days was familiar and repeated like a penman beautifully inscribing again and again, in practice, a series of it’s and w’s and m’s, day after day the line repeated in delicate rills.”

— Ray Bradbury

479. “Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones.”

— Ray Bradbury

480. “Those women like to see their tongues dance.”

— Ray Bradbury

481. “All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn’t matter if you have a beautiful face or not.”

— Ray Bradbury

482. “Once the bomb release was yanked, it was finished. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were invisible; yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions, and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few precious memories and, puzzled, dies.”

— Ray Bradbury

483. “My job is to help you fall in love.”

— Ray Bradbury

484. “I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”

— Ray Bradbury

485. “Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.”

— Ray Bradbury

486. “How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt?”

— Ray Bradbury

487. “If we try to deny the darkness in our souls then we’ll become completely dark.”

— Ray Bradbury

488. “I love writing, it’s the center of my life. If you don’t love what you do, you’d better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don’t have a reason for living.”

— Ray Bradbury

489. “Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I’m one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.”

— Ray Bradbury

490. “And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world there was no longer need of firemen for the old purpose. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors.”

— Ray Bradbury

491. “We are anthill men upon an anthill world.”

— Ray Bradbury

492. “I never went to college, so I went to the library.”

— Ray Bradbury

493. “All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

495. “Do you remember what happened to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? A whole civilization destroyed by greedy, righteous bigots. History will never forgive Cortez.”

— Ray Bradbury

496. “I don’t decide. My secret self decides. I just go with my subconscious. If it wants to do a poem, I do a poem, and if it wants to do a play, I do a play. So I’m not in charge, I’m not in control.”

— Ray Bradbury

497. “You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do-and they don’t. They have prejudices.”

— Ray Bradbury

498. “Most of my stories are ideas in action. In other words, I get a concept, and I let it run away. I find a character to act out the idea. And then the story takes care of itself.”

— Ray Bradbury

499. “It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another.”

— Ray Bradbury

500. “Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.”

— Ray Bradbury