Ray Bradbury Quotes

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

Four days, eight days, twelve days passed, and he was invited to teas, to suppers, to lunches. They sat talking through the long green afternoons - they talked of art, of literature, of life, of society and politics. They ate ice creams and squabs and drank good wines.

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.

...trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound.

The sidewalks were haunted by dustghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up,swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice onthe lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strol-lers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed avolcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes every-where, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritabledogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spon-taneous combustion at three in the morning.Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element forelement. Air ran like hot spring waters nowhere, with nosound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serenevapors. Tar was poured licorice in the streets, red bricks werebrass and gold, roof tops were paved with bronze. The high-tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threatabove the unslept houses. The cicadas sang louder and yet louder. The sun did not rise, it overflowed.

Well, I've kept you waiting long enough," he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself.

And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear. He listened to the wind and the falling ocean and my voice, always with rapt attention, a concentration that almost excluded physical bodies themselves and kept only the sounds.

When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?