(b. 1920– )
U.S. fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery writer
Ray Bradbury
All my life. I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn it over and say, “Hey, there’s a story.”
Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews, by Sam Weller (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010).
You did not hear them coming. You hardly heard them go. The grass bent down, sprang up again. They passed like cloud shadows downhill … the boys of summer, running.
Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 21.
There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I’ll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it!
Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 35.
All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers.
Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 160.
If your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.
Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), x.
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), viii.