Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

404. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

406. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

408. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

417. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

419. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

434. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

443. “The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.”

— Ray Bradbury

444. “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

445. “When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people.”

— Ray Bradbury

446. “He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.”

— Ray Bradbury

447. “It learned you can’t love anything too much in this world.”

— Ray Bradbury

448. “We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.”

— Ray Bradbury

449. “That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury