"To Think That Thought Could Live That Long! A Million Years, Perhaps, All These Thoughts Of Death And

A Medicine for Melancholy, Ray Bradbury

15-year-old Ray Bradbury with Marlene Dietrich, 1935

“I was madly in love with Hollywood… I had been roller skating all over the town and was absolutely obsessed with getting autographs from all those glamorous stars. It was great. I saw really big MGM stars like Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Ronald Colman. Or I would hang out all day in front of Paramount or Columbia, then rush to the Brown Derby to look at the stars coming in or out of there. I saw Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen – everyone who’d been to the coast. Mae West appeared every Friday with her bodyguard. …I still have these autographs, and the wheels from the rollers also survived to these days. Almost all of those people I had met are already gone, but by some miracle Marlene and George survived. The light coming from these photos is like a repeated session of my life about a slightly stupid, but always loyal boy who terribly didn’t want to grow up.”

- Ray Bradbury

“I’ll hold on to the world tight some day. I’ve got one finger on it now; that’s a beginning.”

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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)

"Can you oppose the forces that see that people die just when they are supposed to die - not too soon, not too late?"

Fred Humiston (1902-1976) - Illustration for Ray Bradbury's 'The Scythe'

(Weird Tales - July 1943)

“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

The Murderer

“Why didn't I start a solitary revolution, deliver man from certain 'conveniences'? 'Convenient for who?'”

— Ray Bradbury

“I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing."

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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