Ray Bradbury - Blog Posts
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“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“Beware the autumn people.”
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
“ When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die. ”
Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree
“October in the Chair,” Neil Gaiman, featured in M is for Magic
“we need not destroy the horrific whale of reality, we may lurk inside it with machineries, plotting our destinies and going our terror-fraught ways toward an hour when we can lie under those stranger suns and bask easy and breathe light and know peace.”
— ray bradbury, “the ardent blasphemers,” introduction to 20,000 leagues under the sea by jules verne
The Martian Chronicles - art by Ian Miller (1979)
“If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go in business because we’d be cynical: “It’s gonna go wrong.” Or “She’s going to hurt me.” Or, “I’ve had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore …” Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
—
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) American writer, futurist, fabulist
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
The Martian Chronicles (USA/UK, 1980).
When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, some day it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.
― Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
—Somewhere a Band is Playing, Ray Bradbury
[text ID: Somewhere a band is playing
Oh listen, oh listen that tune!
If you learn it you’ll dance on forever
In June and yet June and more June.
And Death will be dumb and not clever
And Death will lie silent forever
In June and June and more June.]
“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)
“We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
There Will Come Soft Rains
“And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.”
— Ray Bradbury
The Crowd
“How swiftly a crowd comes… like the iris of an eye closing in out of nowhere.”
— Ray Bradbury
‘It’s not you I worry about,’ said Douglas. ‘It’s the way God runs the world.’
Tom thought about this for a moment.
‘He’s all right, Doug,’ said Tom. ‘He tries.’
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse
“The mob-mind, said his subconscious. You're symbolic of the crowd. They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they're fascinated with the snake-pit.”
— Ray Bradbury
The One Who Waits
“We bend to the well, looking down. From the cool depths six faces peer back up at us.
One by one we bend until our balance is gone, and one by one drop into the mouth and down through cool darkness into the cold waters.”
— Ray Bradbury
The Fog Horn
“That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.”
— Ray Bradbury
The Murderer
“Why didn't I start a solitary revolution, deliver man from certain 'conveniences'? 'Convenient for who?'”
— Ray Bradbury
The Last Night of the World
“Maybe because it was never October 19, 1969, ever before in history, and now it is and that’s it; because this date means more than any other date ever meant; because it’s the year when things are as they are all over the world and that’s why it’s the end.”
— Ray Bradbury
an incomplete list of unsettling short stories I read in textbooks
the scarlet ibis
marigolds
the diamond necklace
the monkey’s paw
the open boat
the lady and the tiger
the minister’s black veil
an occurrence at owl creek bridge
a rose for emily
(I found that one by googling “short story corpse in the house,” first result)
the cask of amontillado
the yellow wallpaper
the most dangerous game
a good man is hard to find
some are well-known, some obscure, some I enjoy as an adult, all made me uncomfortable between the ages of 11-15
add your own weird shit, I wanna be literary and disturbed
“Play the man, Master Ridley…”
“It Was A Pleasure to Burn” by Sunny (me!)
A defiled and half-burned corpse, featuring poems made from the scraps of words on both the front and back. I could feel the book die as i burned it and it was a truly devastating but necessary experience for the piece. I actually made this piece in 2023, and it scares me how it’s becoming more and more relevant. Protect your books at all costs. Defend them with everything you’ve got. You won’t know just how valuable they are until you have been stripped of them.
Water color, colored pencil and flame on Ray Bradbury’s “Farenheit 451” 60th anniversary edition
He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground.
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451