Latest Posts by bradburyworks - Page 3
"So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven’t seen her for years. I can’t even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She’s safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn’t changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I’ll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I’ll swim in the lake, or I’ll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I’m in this old and ruined dragon. I’m the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming."
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Your favourite from the winners of the writers polls I've done a little while ago
(I promise that I AM painfully aware of the fact that Shakespeare is overpowered...)
“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
"So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven’t seen her for years. I can’t even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She’s safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn’t changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I’ll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I’ll swim in the lake, or I’ll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I’m in this old and ruined dragon. I’m the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming."
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
"It was a pleasure to burn."
“waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. waiting and waiting.”
illustration for "the fog horn" by ray bradbury
“So 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, “Zen in the Art of Writing”
"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
From The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury’s 1949 sci-fi classic.
“The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats. Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.” ― Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree
JOMP Book Photo Challenge || October 31 || Books and Candy:
Joseph Mugnaini - The Halloween Tree, 1972
"That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts." -Ray Bradbury, "The October Country"
The October Country - art by Joseph Mugnaini (1955)
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
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
“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
"That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts." -Ray Bradbury, "The October Country"
The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.
R is for Rocket, Ray Bradbury
Illustration based on ray bradburys the fog horn
Message of Ray Bradbury.
"When I was 19 years old I couldn't go to college because I came from a poor family. We had no money, so I went to the library at least. Three days a week I read every possible book. At the age of 27 I have actually completed almost the entire library instead of university. So I got my education in the library and for free. When a person wants something, they will find a way to achieve it.
I would like to remind you one thing:
Humans should never forget that we have been assigned only a very small place on earth, that we live surrounded by nature that can easily take back everything that has ever given to man.
It costs absolutely nothing in her way to one day blow us all off the face of the earth or flood the waters of the ocean with her single breath, just to remind man once again that he is not as all-powerful as he still foolishly thinks. "
Ray Bradbury
American writer
It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason.
—Ray Bradbury
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Ray Bradbury
"To think that thought could live that long! A million years, perhaps, all these thoughts of death and disorder and conquest, lingering in the innocent but poisonous air of the planet, waiting for a real man to give them a channel through which they might issue again in all their senseless virulence."
Asleep in Armageddon, Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury, the lake
“The October Country…that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…” -Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 [ID in ALT]