Ray Bradbury - Blog Posts
Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?" "Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.
—Ray Bradbury
“A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least.
You can’t act if you don’t know.”
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
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.
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)
Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?" "Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.
—Ray Bradbury
“That’s the whole secret: To do things that excite you.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203
McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he switched it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fish skin glittering in webs between the finger-like projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a cauldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.
Illustration by Aleta Jenks for The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury.
Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?" "Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.
—Ray Bradbury
“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” - Ray Bradbury
Illustration of The Long Rain by Ray Bradbury. Art by Cristina Bencina.
Available as a print here.
“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
“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” - Ray Bradbury
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
- Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)
“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
My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking chairs any more. They're too comfortable. Get people up and running around. ~Ray Bradbury
(Book: Fahrenheit 451 https://amzn.to/3MgR9Hz)
(Art: Photograph by H. Armstrong Roberts)
“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
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
What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people.
There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight – Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck – tonight you could almost taste time.” ― Ray Bradbury, “The Martian Chronicles” (William Morrow Paperbacks; May 21, 2013) (via Alive on All Channels)
“A witch is born out of the true hungers of her time.”
— Ray Bradbury, Long After Midnight, 1976
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
“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
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.
Complete original artwork for “I, Rocket,” an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story by Al Feldstein (script), Al Williamson (pencils and inks), Frank Frazetta (inks), and Roy G. Krenkel (background pencils and inks) from Weird Fantasy #20, published by EC Comics, July 1953.
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]
“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