Ray Bradbury

Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.

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.
The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over.

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

A good night's sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug.

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed.
As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over, so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

...to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big.
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.

War's never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms.

Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy.

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

"Some people turn sad awfully young," he said. "No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them."

"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm anti-social, they say... I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it?. Social to me means talking about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice... But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not... They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball... Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lamp-posts, playing `chicken' and 'knock hub-caps. I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another... Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?"

The test is, ask yourself, Do I want it with all my heart? Could I live through the day without it? If you figure to be dead by sundown, grab the darned thing and run.

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....

Sandwich outdoors isn't a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.