“‘Why Is It,’ He Said, One Time, At The Subway Entrance, 'I Feel I’ve Known You So Many Years?’

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Ray Bradbury — Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

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

Ray Bradbury

“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them.”

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least.

You can’t act if you don’t know.”

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, some day it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.

― Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"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

McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he switched it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fish skin glittering in webs between the finger-like projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a cauldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.

Illustration by Aleta Jenks for The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury.

All Summer in a Day, Ray Bradbury

"...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

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, 1950