Michael Whelan’s Cover Art For The 40th Anniversary Edition Of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, 1950

*Originally published under the title "The World the Children Made"

“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...”

-Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

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

Ray Bradbury - The Hound (Joseph Mugnaini)

‘It’s not you I worry about,’ said Douglas. ‘It’s the way God runs the world.’

Tom thought about this for a moment.

‘He’s all right, Doug,’ said Tom. ‘He tries.’

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

"The monster shrieked closer, half through the forest now, thrashing and plunging, crushing the wildflowers, frightening rabbits and clouds of birds that rose screaming to the stars."

- Ray Bradbury, Death Is a Lonely Business (1985)

“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

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 [ID in ALT]