How did you get shaken up? What knocked the torch out of your hands?’ ‘I don’t know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy.
Then the telephone rang like a spoiled brat. I shoved it down the Insinkerator. I must state here and now I have nothing whatever against the Insinkerator; it was an innocent bystander. I feel sorry for it now, a practical device indeed, which never said a word, purred like a sleepy lion most of the time, and digested our leftovers. I’ll have it restored.
Any time now, Mr. Forrester will think it over and see it’s just the only way and have a good cry and then look around and see it’s morning again, even though it’s five in the afternoon.
Eso es lo bueno de estar moribundo. Cuando no se tiene nada que perder, pueden correrse todos los riesgos.
Science and machines can kill each other off or be replaced. Myth, seen in mirrors, incapable of being touched, stays on.
He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea.
Fuego brillante Posfacio de Ray Bradbury, febrero de 1993.
Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you?
It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them.
I hope we will not get too serious here, for seriousness is the Red Death if we let it move too freely amongst us. Its freedom is our prison and our defeat and death. A good idea should worry us like a dog. We should not, in turn, worry it into the grave, smother it with intellect, pontificate it into snoozing, kill it with the death of a thousand analytical slices.
Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.
He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet.
No, child. I’m old enough and cold enough; the hottest day won’t thaw me.
The more I did, the more I wanted to do.
I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow.
If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere – and went.
You ever seen a burned house? It smolders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me the rest of my life.
Mistakes can be profited by.
When it is a long damp November in my soul, and I think too much and perceive too little, I know it is high time to get back to that boy with the tennis shoes, the high fevers, the multitudinous joys, and the terrible nightmares. I’m not sure where he leaves off and I start.
More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee.