“There Is More Than One Way To Burn A Book. And The World Is Full Of People Running About With Lit

"Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them."

-Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“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 a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine (William Morrow Paperbacks; April 23, 2013) (via Cultural Offering)

'Yes, Mr. Douglas, insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.'

— Ray Bradbury, "The Meadow"

“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

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. 

~Ray Bradbury (Book: Fahrenheit 451)

[Philo Thoughts]

Ray Bradbury, the lake

So like....where does Ray Bradbury fall on the cozy horror scale?

Because there's a coziness in the nostalgia of long ago Halloweens in The Halloween Tree.

There's a coziness in the Elliotts family, made up of monsters, ghouls, and one perfectly average boy, from The Dust Returned.

There are even cozy aspects in Something Wicked This Way Comes, that even when there's a dark carnival changing and warping people, William Halloway still finds comfort and reassurance in the presence of his father.

Bradbury sure knew how to make horror stories memorable and terrifying, and yet, some of them feel like a warm blanket on a chill, autumn night.

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

— Ray Bradbury

René Magritte, The Land of Miracles, 1964