Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much?”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

387. “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

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. “Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.”

— Ray Bradbury

390. “More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere.”

— Ray Bradbury

391. “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

392. “I’m inclined to believe you need the psychiatrist.”

— Ray Bradbury

393. “The real fear isn’t rejection, but that there won’t be enough time in your life to write all the stories that you have in you.”

— Ray Bradbury

394. “From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.”

— Ray Bradbury

395. “Don’t listen,” whispered Faber. “He’s trying to confuse. He’s slippery. Watch out.”

— Ray Bradbury

396. “I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they’re going.”

— Ray Bradbury

397. “Suddenly the day was gone, night came out from under each tree and spread.”

— Ray Bradbury

398. “Faber sniffed the book. “Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy.”

— Ray Bradbury

399. “I feel I’m doing what I should’ve done a lifetime ago. For a little while I’m not afraid. Maybe it’s because I’m doing the right thing at last. Maybe it’s because I’ve done a rash thing and don’t want to look the coward to you.”

— Ray Bradbury

400. “Now, sucking all the night into his open mouth and blowing it out pale, with all the blackness left heavily inside himself...”

— Ray Bradbury