The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
-Ray Bradbury
The Crowd
“How swiftly a crowd comes… like the iris of an eye closing in out of nowhere.”
— Ray Bradbury
Asleep in Armageddon, Ray Bradbury
“I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn’t forget, I’m alive, I know I’m alive, I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.”
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine (Green Town, #1)
Cover illustration by Louis S. Glanzman
Info from ISFDB
"It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason."
– Ray Bradbury
“And a last thought from Tom: O Mr. Moundshroud, will we EVER stop being afraid of nights and death? And the thought returned: When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The Halloween Tree
"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
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)
“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