Some People Turn Sad Awfully Young ... No Special Reason, It Seems, But They Seem Almost To Be Born That

Sunsets are loved because they vanish.

-- Ray Bradbury

(Cluj, Romania)

The Martian Chronicles (USA/UK, 1980).

From The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury’s 1949 sci-fi classic.

"All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe."

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

"To think that thought could live that long! A million years, perhaps, all these thoughts of death and disorder and conquest, lingering in the innocent but poisonous air of the planet, waiting for a real man to give them a channel through which they might issue again in all their senseless virulence."

Asleep in Armageddon, 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”

It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason.

—Ray Bradbury

comic adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Fog Horn

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”

— Ray Bradbury

Advert for the film version of Fahrenheit 451 on a tram at St. Stephen’s Boulevard, Budapest, 1969. From the Budapest municipal photography company archive.