“I Want To Feel All There Is To Feel, He Thought. Let Me Feel Tired, Now, Let Me Feel Tired. I Mustn’t

“So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”

— Ray Bradbury, “Zen in the Art of Writing”

Some people turn sad awfully young ... No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer, and ... get sadder younger than anyone else in the world.

– Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people.

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight – Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck – tonight you could almost taste time.” ― Ray Bradbury, “The Martian Chronicles” (William Morrow Paperbacks; May 21, 2013) (via Alive on All Channels)

"All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe."

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“‘Why is it,’ he said, one time, at the subway entrance, 'I feel I’ve known you so many years?’ 'Because I like you,’ she said, 'and I don’t want anything from you.’”

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive”, ink on paper, 2021. Dedicated to the mystical Ray Bradbury. Happy birthday to me

Michael Whelan’s cover art for the 40th anniversary edition of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1990)

Source

The October Country - art by Joseph Mugnaini (1955)