Ray Bradbury: Beautiful Quotes

When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor.
He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands.
And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did.
I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did.
He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did.
He was individual.
He was an important man.
I've never gotten over his death.
Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died.
How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands.
He shaped the world.
He did things to the world.
The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

One time, when he was a child, in a power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon....

He liked to listen to the silence, he said, if silence could be listened to, for, he went on, in that silence you could hear wildflower pollen sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air!

... dead cities have a way of making you want to whisper, to watch the sun go down.

"How many of you are there?"
"Thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside."

... nighttime was the time of change and affliction.

Deep in winter they had looked for bits and pieces of summer and found it in furnace cellars or in bonfires on the edge of frozen skating ponds at night. Now, in summer, they went searching for some little bit, some piece of the forgotten winter.

You could see her thoughts swimming around in her eyes, like fish — some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy.

Real horror is when you see something familiar, but so changed that you hardly recognize it.

And so, the most accidental of chance made it the core, the focus of the avant-garde literary movement, the wildest on the memory of mankind.