“That’s The Whole Secret: To Do Things That Excite You.”

raw vegetable hours

this poll is for things that you would conceivably eat on its own, with your hands, e.g., a plate of only carrots + dip. don't submit something like lettuce or something else that's just part of a salad because if you are just eating a bowl of lettuce and dressing with your bare hands you are lying

the rocket man

“Doug,” he said, about five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our towels and heading back along the beach near the surf. “I want you to promise me something.

“Don’t ever be a rocket man.”

I stopped.

“I mean it,” he said, “because when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that. Don’t let it get hold of you.

“You don’t know what it is. Every time I’m out there I think, if I ever get back to Earth I’ll stay there, I’ll never go out again. But I go out and I guess I’ll always go out.”

“I’ve thought about being a Rocket Man for a long time,” I said.

He didn’t hear me. “I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I started trying so damned hard to stay here.”

I remembered him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing and listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and the towns and the land and his family were the only real things and the good things. But I knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion from our front porch.

“Promise me you won’t be like me,” he said.

ray bradbury, maclean's magazine, march 1, 1951

"Science fiction is the art of the possible."

—Ray Bradbury, born on this day in 1920

"So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven’t seen her for years. I can’t even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She’s safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn’t changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I’ll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I’ll swim in the lake, or I’ll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I’m in this old and ruined dragon. I’m the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming."

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”

— Ray Bradbury

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Ray Bradbury

The October Country - art by Joseph Mugnaini (1955)

September Loneliness

Ray Bradbury// September Morn, Paul Émile Chabas// "Persephone", Alice Jones// Painting with the Padre, Daniel Garber// Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami// Sunny September, Helen McNicoll// "Autumn Psalm", Julia de Burgos