*when I Say Girlie I Mean It Truly In A Non Gender Specific Way, This Poll Is For Everyone!

The years go by. The time flies. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you’re looking back... well, it amounts to everything.

-- 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

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

Happy 100th birthday, Ray Bradbury (b. 22 August 1920) 

Illustration based on ray bradburys the fog horn

“Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...”

-Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past.

Ray Bradbury, dandelion wine

“I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.”

— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

"And if you look" -- she nodded at the sky -- "there's a man in the moon." He hadn't looked for a long time.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 [ID in ALT]