Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.”

— Ray Bradbury

352. “Her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall, but it felt no rain; over which clouds might pass their moving shadows, but she felt no shadow.”

— Ray Bradbury

353. “The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.”

— Ray Bradbury

354. “Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?”

— Ray Bradbury

355. “This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are.”

— Ray Bradbury

356. “Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page, from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the secondhand notions and time-worn philosophies.”

— Ray Bradbury

357. “My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think.”

— Ray Bradbury

358. “Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.”

— Ray Bradbury

359. “Off hours, yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!”

— Ray Bradbury

360. “Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much?”

— Ray Bradbury

361. “You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

— Ray Bradbury

362. “You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead.”

— Ray Bradbury

363. “The 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 it.”

— Ray Bradbury

364. “Remember, Montag, we’re the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.”

— Ray Bradbury

365. “I’ll hold on to the world tight some day. I’ve got one finger on it now; that’s a beginning.”

— Ray Bradbury

366. “I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?”

— Ray Bradbury

367. “On the front porch where she had come to weigh them quietly with her eyes, her quietness a condemnation, the woman stood motionless.”

— Ray Bradbury

368. “You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.”

— Ray Bradbury

369. “The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we’ve stashed away. But there are times when we’re all autumn people.”

— Ray Bradbury

370. “Montag looked at the river. We’ll go on the river. He looked at the old railroad tracks. Or we’ll go that way. Or we’ll walk on the highways now, and we’ll have time to put things into ourselves. And someday, after it sets in us a long time, it’ll come out our hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.”

— Ray Bradbury

371. “It is good to renew one’s wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.”

— Ray Bradbury

372. “And Will? Why, he’s the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they’re not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it’s not that. It’s just, you know, seeing them pass, that’s how they’ll be all their life; they’ll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?”

— Ray Bradbury

373. “The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”

— Ray Bradbury

374. “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple the population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?”

— Ray Bradbury

375. “Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it’s finally me, where it’s in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I get hold of it so it’ll never run off. I’ll hold onto the world tight someday. I’ve got one finger on it now; that’s a beginning.”

— Ray Bradbury

376. “Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

— Ray Bradbury

377. “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”

— Ray Bradbury

378. “The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.”

— Ray Bradbury

379. “No person ever died that had a family.”

— Ray Bradbury

380. “The multicolored or grey lights touching their faces, but never really touching them...”

— Ray Bradbury

381. “The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent 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

382. “And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bed-sheets around corners.”

— Ray Bradbury

383. “Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.”

— Ray Bradbury

384. “The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.”

— Ray Bradbury

385. “She didn’t want to know -how- a thing was done, but -why-. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead.”

— Ray Bradbury

386. “But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.”

— Ray Bradbury

387. “We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.”

— Ray Bradbury

388. “They read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlor was so empty and gray-looking.”

— Ray Bradbury

389. “You don’t question Providence. If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.”

— Ray Bradbury

390. “Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.”

— Ray Bradbury

391. “The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All.”

— Ray Bradbury

392. “Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.”

— Ray Bradbury

393. “This age thinks better of a gilded fool than of a threadbare saint in wisdom’s school.”

— Ray Bradbury

394. “There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”

— Ray Bradbury

395. “My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We’re all god.”

— Ray Bradbury

396. “So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”

— Ray Bradbury

397. “The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.”

— Ray Bradbury

398. “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them.”

— Ray Bradbury

399. “The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years.”

— Ray Bradbury

400. “We all have our harps to play. And it’s up to you now to know with which ear you’ll listen.”

— Ray Bradbury