Time only works well in one direction. Back. I control the past. I’ll be damned if I know what to do with the present, and to hell with the future. I’m not going to be there, don’t want to go there, and would hate you if you made me. It’s a perfect life.
The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forest and watch the birds and collect butterflies.
So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long. With this knowledge came pity and mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love.
The woman knew every language and every word in every language. She spoke with fire and alcohol and smoke.
Scrabbling about, every part of her seemed a separate animal. Her arms and legs, her hands, her head, each was a lopped off bit of some creature wild to return to itself, but blind to the proper way of making that return.
Some summers refuse to end.
He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon.
Did you ever read that story about the man who traveled to the future and found everyone there insane? Everyone. But since they were all insane they didn’t know they were all insane. They all acted alike and so they thought themselves normal. And since our hero was the only sane one among them, he was abnormal; therefore, he was the insane one. To them, at least. Yes, Mr. Douglas, insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
A dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees the furthest of the two!
Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much?
Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I’ll say yes. They’re all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we’ll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names.
The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us, Mr. Valery once said.
The nightmare of living was begun.
I’ve tried to teach my writing friends that there are two arts: number one, getting a thing done; and then, the second great art is learning how to cut it so you don’t kill it or hurt it in any way. When you start out life as a writer, you hate that job, but now that I’m older it’s turned into a wonderful game, and I love the challenge just as much as writing the original, because it’s a challenge. It’s an intellectual challenge to get a scalpel and cut the patient without killing.” If.
But now, falling here, with everything over, I’m not jealous of you anymore, because it’s over for you as it is for me, and right now it’s like it never was.
Bradbury virtually lived in the public libraries. of his time and came see the shelves as populations of living authors: to burn the book is to burn the author, and to burn the author is to deny our own humanity.
I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!
How many times has my mother said, ‘Don’t eat so much, Chris, your eyes are bigger than your stomach?’” “A million times.” “Two million. Well, paraphrase it, Ralph. Change it to ‘Don’t see so much, Chris, your mind is too big for your body.’ I got a war on between a mind that wants things my body can’t give it.
The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies. I’ll show you my collection some day.” “Good.” “They want to know what I do with all my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won’t tell them what. I’ve got them running. And sometimes, I tell them, I like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall in my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it?
What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn’t it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, “That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!” Then and only then is writing worthwhile. Quite.