“Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic. ”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“And what, you ask, does writing teach us?
First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“If she fell, if she broke, you'd find a million fragments in the morning. Bright crystal and clear wine on the parquet flooring, that's all you'd see at dawn.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“I was only twelve. But I knew how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that was no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long Autumn days of the years past when I carried her books home from school.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“..love cushions all your irritations, unnatural instincts, hatreds and immaturities.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“I suppose it's an unconscious little stream of wit that flows quietly under everything I do or say.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they're fascinated with the snake-pit. ”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the moist swampland. One of those things in a big jar that makes your stomach jump as it does when you see a preserved arm in a laboratory vat.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“Well, I've kept you waiting long enough," he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“And with the trick, much admired by magicians, of sitting in a green velour chair and-vanishing! Turn your head and you forgot his face. Vanilla pudding.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“A red ganglion, no bigger than a scarlet thread, snapped and quivered; a nerve, no greater than a red linen fiber twisted. Deep in her one little mech was gone and the entire machine, imbalanced, was about to steadily shake itself to bits.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“He had seen her painted sign by the road: Skin Illustration! Illustration instead of tattoo! Artistic!”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“Once in a lifetime anyway, it's nice to make a mistake if you think it'll do somebody some good," she”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“His heart cringed from the fanning motion of ribs like pale spiders crouched and fiddling with their prey.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“Ah, no, ah, no. There, senor, you would be wrong. Knowing that after the first year the rent is liable not to be paid, we bury the poorest two feet down. It is less work, you understand? of course, we must judge by the family who owns a body.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“His teeth began to chatter. God All-Mighty! he thought, why haven't I realized it all these years? All these years I've gone around with a--SKELETON--inside me! How is it we take ourselves for granted? How is it we never question our bodies and our being? A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things that sway from neck-chains in abandoned webbed closets, one of those things found on the desert all long and scattered like dice!”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
“Her eyes reversed into herself, to watch the secret heart of herself pounding itself into pieces against the side of her chest.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from The October Country
Ray Bradbury
Born place: in Waukegan, Illinois, The United States
Born date August 22, 1920
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“The world is always in a hurry, but I teach My children patience. Live, expecting a full and joyous life. And learn to trust My perfect timing so that you may discover that all the pain found in waiting has a magnificent and awesome purpose.”
― Eric Ludy, quote from When God Writes Your Love Story
“A new moon lay on its back, and stars were out. Here, away from lights and sounds of town or village, the night was deep, the black sky stretching, fathomless, away among the spheres to some unimaginable world where gods walked, and suns and moons showered down like petals falling. Some power there is that draws men's eyes and hearts up and outward, beyond the heavy clay that fastens them to earth. Music can take them, and the moon's light, and, I suppose, love, though I had not known it then, except in worship.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“I Knew a Woman"
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).
Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).”
― Theodore Roethke, quote from The Collected Poems
“Copernicus formulated the heliocentric model of the solar system in the mid-1500s, but the Church didn't get around to punishing anyone for it until they threw Galileo in jail nearly a hundred years later.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“I do not want to date you."
He groaned. "Liv. You've got to be kidding me. I picked up my whole life, drove halfway across the country, and you've changed your mind? It's only been fifteen days since you told me you still love me!"
"Shut up, will you? Will you please just shut up and kiss me again, you big idiot?" With both hands on his face, she molded her lips to his as her heart did a happy dance in her chest. Between kisses, she said, "I want to live with you and marry you and have a family with you and share your life--all the things you said you wanted from me before I ruined it. So no, I will not date you.”
― Marie Force, quote from Everyone Loves a Hero
Forest of the Gods
Battle of the Ampere
Prick
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