Ray Bradbury: life quotes

No one has time any more for anyone else.

Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you're twenty.

Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue.
Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush.
Everyone using everyone else's coattails.
How are you supposed to root for the home team when you don't even have a programme or know the names?
For that matter, what colour jerseys are they wearing as they trot out on to the field?

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy.

Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.

No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.

You lived with people every day and they never altered a degree. It was only when people had been off on a long trip, for years, that they shocked you.

Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone?

To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that. But what else. What else? Something, something. . .

She was the first person in a good many years I've really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted.

We're all fools," said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. 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.

I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat.
I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.

"People don't talk about anything."
"Oh, they must!"
"No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the cafes they have the jokeboxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the coloured patterns running up and down, but it's only colour and all abstract."

I've always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge.

People forget if they don't keep testing things.