Ray Bradbury Quotes

the streams buck like rams in a tent / whips crack and from the hills come the crookedly combed /shadows of the shepherds. /black eggs and fools' bells fall from the trees. / thunder drums and kettledrums beat upon the ears of the donkeys. / wings brush against flowers. / fountains spring up in the eyes of the wild boar.

I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again. No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

O fairest flower! no sooner blown but blasted, Soft silken primrose fading timelessly.

And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist.

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Look who's calling the cauldron black." "Kettle. It’s a kettle. Get your metaphors right." "That wasn’t a metaphor. It was a, you know..." He stared off into space, blinking. "One of those things that’s symbolic of another thing. But isn’t the same thing. Just like it." "You mean a metaphor?" "No! It’s like a story...like...a proverb! That’s it." "I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a proverb. Maybe it was an analogy." "I don’t think so.

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases.

I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.

To think that so much comes to so little, to think that life is really short.

Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe.

Beautiful things never last. That’s why fireflies flash.

As fog moved to the mainland I heard a flock of birds fly over. They sounded like a dress rustling, a dress being unfastened and dropping to the floor. Fog came unpinned like hair. On the beach cliffs, great colonies of datura - jimson weed - with their white trumpet flowers, looked like brass bands.

I've learned a lot as a writer about poetry.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

time is a tree (this life one leaf) but love is the sky and i am for you just so long and long enough