“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” - Ray Bradbury
“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”
Complete original artwork for “I, Rocket,” an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story by Al Feldstein (script), Al Williamson (pencils and inks), Frank Frazetta (inks), and Roy G. Krenkel (background pencils and inks) from Weird Fantasy #20, published by EC Comics, July 1953.
"...one thirty-five. Thursday morning, November 4th,... one thirty-six... one thirty-seven a.m...."[...]"...one forty-five..." The voice-clock mourned out the cold colour of a cold morning of a still colder year.
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
“All graves are wrong graves when you come down to it,” he said. “No,” I said. “There are right graves and wrong ones, just as there are good times to die and bad times.”
—Ray Bradbury, The Kilimanjaro Device
“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...”
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noon go quickly, ducks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain...
Ray Bradbury
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
-Ray Bradbury
Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
“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.”
— Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
The Last Night of the World
“Maybe because it was never October 19, 1969, ever before in history, and now it is and that’s it; because this date means more than any other date ever meant; because it’s the year when things are as they are all over the world and that’s why it’s the end.”
— Ray Bradbury