Ray Bradbury Quotes

By the age of 50, I would like to know that I'm not dead - that there's some continuity to my life.

What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.

I think at the prospect of bringing children into the world, your mortality comes very much to the forefront, absolutely.

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.

After all, at end of the day, when you're breathing your last, it's not your producer, director, or cast mates by your bedside; it's your children. Keep that in mind.

I've reached the 50th year of my life, and now every question related with life also includes thinking about death. When I leave, I want to leave to my offspring a clear idea about identity.

To live another person's life is quite a weird thing.

I am; I was. I want to be.

After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts - like a Chinese nest of boxes - oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front - in our ancestors, back and back until.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.

A man is not completely born until he is dead.

A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?

Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.

It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.

I'm simply pointing out that what happens to us isn't the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we're not together.

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.

How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister?

We live our lives based on who we think we are.

Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.

Finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist.

Who we are matters immeasurably more than what we know or who we want to be.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.