Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “We all have our harps to play. And it’s up to you now to know with which ear you’ll listen.”

— Ray Bradbury

402. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

407. “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

408. “Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.”

— Ray Bradbury

409. “Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.”

— Ray Bradbury

414. “The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don’t think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now.”

— Ray Bradbury

415. “She was beginning to shriek now, sitting there like a wax doll melting in its own heat.”

— Ray Bradbury

416. “This is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted. There.”

— Ray Bradbury

417. “Through lack of education, we’re not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

419. “Evil has only the power we give it.”

— Ray Bradbury

420. “God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.”

— Ray Bradbury

421. “The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.”

— Ray Bradbury

422. “Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle.”

— Ray Bradbury

423. “Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”

— Ray Bradbury

424. “Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.”

— Ray Bradbury

425. “There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!”

— Ray Bradbury

426. “No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.”

— Ray Bradbury

427. “Men are nuts. Young men are crazy. We all love toys. I’m toy oriented. I write about toys. I’ve got a lot of toys. Hundreds of things. But computers are toys, and men like to mess around with smart dumb things. They feel creative.”

— Ray Bradbury

428. “The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile.”

— Ray Bradbury

429. “At least you were a fool about the right things,” said Faber.”

— Ray Bradbury

430. “Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he’s the Lord of all Creation.”

— Ray Bradbury

431. “Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending.”

— Ray Bradbury

432. “The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.”

— Ray Bradbury

433. “Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you?”

— Ray Bradbury

434. “It was in their friendship they just wanted to run forever, shadow and shadow.”

— Ray Bradbury

435. “The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.”

— Ray Bradbury

436. “A young reader finding this book today, or the day after tomorrow, is going to have to imagine first a past, and then a future that belongs to that past.”

— Ray Bradbury

437. “I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it?”

— Ray Bradbury

438. “We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law.”

— Ray Bradbury

439. “What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.”

— Ray Bradbury

440. “I’m still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.”

— Ray Bradbury

441. “It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he’s the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them.”

— Ray Bradbury

442. “May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

— Ray Bradbury

443. “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

444. “Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.”

— Ray Bradbury

445. “My cowardice is such of passion, complimenting the revolutionary spirit that lives in its shadow.”

— Ray Bradbury

446. “He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.”

— Ray Bradbury

447. “Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don’t they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.”

— Ray Bradbury

448. “Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.”

— Ray Bradbury

449. “He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.”

— Ray Bradbury

450. “He slapped her face with amazing objectivity and repeated the question.”

— Ray Bradbury