Ray Bradbury Quotes

Thou little bird, thou dweller by the sea, Why takest thou its melancholy voice, And with that boding cry Along the waves dost thou fly? Oh! rather, bird, with me Through this fair land rejoice!

There's the moon asking to stay long enough for the clouds to fly me away

My days are gone a-wandering.

It was a perfect night for a train. The occasional whistle told Louis of all the farewells he had ever known.

I keep thinking I'm going to miss it back in Los Angeles. But I don't. The only thing I miss is driving out in the desert in the Southwest.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow in the waters that was soon lost in the West. There he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-Earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart.

Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.

There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!

During the days in detention, I thought most about the moon.

The sea-road is good for wanderers and landless men. There is quenching of thirst on the grey paths of the winds, and the flying clouds to still the sting of lost dreams.

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

There rises the moon, broad and tranquil, through the branches of a walnut tree on a hill opposite. I apostrophize it in the words of Faust; "O gentle moon, that lookest for the last time upon my agonies!" --or something to that effect.

I wish I had a river I could skate away on?

That's what I wanted for myself for even just a little while-to be unaware of the rest of the world. I needed some time.

Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.

...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.

For me, it feels like driving from truth into a lie, from adulthood to childhoold. I watch the land of pavement and glass and metal turn into an empty field. The snow is falling softly now, and I can faintly see the city's skyline up ahead, the buildings just a shade darker than the clouds.

I write a lot of my best music in the car, like late night. Three, four in the morning. I'm in the passenger seat, I got my driver, my getaway driver. My Bonnie, I'm Clyde. That's when everything is just settled. In the daytime it's chaotic. Everybody just goin' nowhere fast. In a rush to go nowhere.

When I was young, I wanted to find the Great Dark Man. When I said that I realise now that people thought that by 'dark' I meant black, and that by 'great' I meant big. Whereas I only meant a strong, mysterious person; someone who would 'take me away from all this.'

At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.

We ran as if to meet the moon.