Ray Bradbury Quotes

One friend dies and we remain indifferent; another dies, perhaps less intimate, and we see ourselves as dead, and weep, mourn, tear our hair or find ourselves caught up in the madness of the wake, competing with others as to who was closest, now suffers most.

but then she did. she died. no more visits, no more phone calls. And without even realizing it, I began to drift, as if my roots had been pulled, as if I were floating down some side branch of a river.

The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.

Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.

In fact, since the accident, Mom doesn't love anyone. She is marble. Beautiful. Frigid. Easily stained by her family. What's left of us anyway. We are corpses. At first, we sought rebirth. But resurrection devoid of her love has made us zombies. We get up every morning, skip breakfast, hurry off to work or school. For in those other places, we are more at home. And sometimes we stagger beneath the weight of grief, the immensity of aloneness.

When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?

She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.

I haven't had a very good day. I think I might still be hung over and everyone's dead and my root beer's gone.

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

I don't know what they'll say when I die. I don't give a damn, but they'll probably cry.

I ought to rejoice in the fact that our principal rival has died, but I don't.

I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.

My parents have been dead for many years, and when your folks are gone there is nobody standing between you and eternity.

After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?

I hate death; it takes people away from you. You're left feeling rudderless.

I saw the dead without really seeing them.

We live in grief for having left the womb, for having left the teat, then school, then home. In my case, it was leaving marriages, and the death of my wife.

There are three things we cry about in life, things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.

We can't feel anything - all that's left inside us is dust.

When the people you love are gone, you're alone.

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

The loss of my father left a great emptiness in my heart.

I know how it feels to lose.

When along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker around me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be