““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 the other.””
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
𝚁𝚊𝚢 𝙱𝚛𝚊𝚍𝚋𝚞𝚛𝚢 Los Angeles, 1980
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
“Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...”
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
"But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them."
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Murderer
“Why didn't I start a solitary revolution, deliver man from certain 'conveniences'? 'Convenient for who?'”
— Ray Bradbury
15-year-old Ray Bradbury with Marlene Dietrich, 1935
“I was madly in love with Hollywood… I had been roller skating all over the town and was absolutely obsessed with getting autographs from all those glamorous stars. It was great. I saw really big MGM stars like Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Ronald Colman. Or I would hang out all day in front of Paramount or Columbia, then rush to the Brown Derby to look at the stars coming in or out of there. I saw Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen – everyone who’d been to the coast. Mae West appeared every Friday with her bodyguard. …I still have these autographs, and the wheels from the rollers also survived to these days. Almost all of those people I had met are already gone, but by some miracle Marlene and George survived. The light coming from these photos is like a repeated session of my life about a slightly stupid, but always loyal boy who terribly didn’t want to grow up.”
- Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury (1929-2012) - It Came From Outer Space, 1970