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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ray Bradbury
Read between
November 3 - November 29, 2024
His voice, Will thought, I never noticed. It’s the same color as his hair.
a sound like the stars turning over in your sleep.
Each soul, a vast warm fingerprint, felt different, she could roil it in her hand like clay; smelled different, Will could hear her snuffing his life away; tasted different, she savored them with her raw-gummed mouth, her puff-adder tongue; sounded different, she stuffed their souls in one ear, tissued them out the other!
lay quietly separate listening to hearts and clocks beat too quickly toward dawn.
She turned her palms out and down as if he were a small stove burning softly somewhere in a nether world and she came to warm her hands at him.
he saw her squinched blind-sewn eyes, the ears with moss in them, the pale wrinkled apricot mouth mummifying the air it drew in, trying to taste what was wrong with his act, his thought.
clutched herself and rocked back and forth, her own child-baby,
sgraffito
Jim opened the door wider and stood in the music, as one stands in the rain.
Maybe the carnival likes accidents,
That carnival, boy, do they know how to punish so you can’t hit back. They just shake you up and change you so no one ever knows you again and let you run free, it’s okay, go ahead, talk, ‘cause folks are too scared of you to listen.
mobs of boys curious and eager for any change mild or wild,
they sucked their breaths like iron Popsicles.
Identify them, sir, and you will share their fortune.
Mr. Dark clenched a fist. A blinding ache struck Jim’s head.
why there’s Mr. Dark, and . . . an old man . . . an old man.” He’s not that old! cried Will to himself,
It had been the longest day of all the days he could remember in his life.
a series of fantastic sketches of the Temptations of St. Anthony. Next some etchings from the Bizarie by Giovanbatista Bracelli, depicting a set of curious toys, humanlike robots engaged in various alchemical rites.
fantoccini.
he had seen enough fear in his life to know it, like the smell from a butcher’s shop in summer twilight.
There was only one thing sure. Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension: By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. So vague, yet so immense. He did not want to live with it. Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it all the rest of his life.
Waiting, his flesh took paleness from his bones.
“The library,” said Will. “I’m even afraid of it, now.” All the books, he thought, perched there, hundreds of years old, peeling skin, leaning on each other like ten million vultures. Walk along the dark stacks and all the gold titles shine their eyes at you.
Deep forests, dark caves, dim churches, half-lit libraries were all the same, they tuned you down, they dampened your ardor, they brought you to murmurs and soft cries for fear of raising up phantom twins of your voice which might haunt corridors long after your passage.
glistery
this boy with the eyes of a man who has lived forever, seen too much, might like to die but doesn’t know how. . . .
For a long moment, Will’s father sat staring blinding into the center of the table. Then, his lips moved. “Jim. Will,” he said. “I believe.”
For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The
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Will, do you really know your Dad? Shouldn’t you know me, and me you, if it’s going to be us’ns against them’ns?”
Still most comfortable in the library nights, in out of the rain of people.
Why am I here at all? Right now, it seems, to help you.”
“I’m a fool. Always looking over your shoulder to see what’s coming instead of right at you to see what’s here.
for what salve it gives me, every man’s a fool. Which means you got to pitch in all your life, bail out, board over, tie rope, patch plaster, pat cheeks, kiss brows, laugh, cry, make do, against the day you’re the worst fool of all and shout ‘Help!’ Then all you need is one person’s answer.
we measure ourselves up the scale from apes, but not half so high as angels.
trying to figure how it all started, when we made the move, when we decided to be different. I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them.
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.
We are the creatures that know and know too much.
I should’ve said more to you any day you name in the past. Hell. Where was I? Leading up to love, I think.
Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night.
an hourglass that told time with bone dust instead of sand.
all the cat-fight marriages where folks spend careers ripping skin off each other and patching it back upside around,
it gorges on fear and pain. That’s the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the scream from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way.”
“How do I know this? I don’t! I feel it. I taste it.
“My skeleton knows. “It tells me “I tell you.”
“Can they . . .” said Jim. “I mean . . . do they . . . buy souls?” “Buy, when they can get them free?” said Mr. Halloway. “Why, most men jump at the chance to give up everything for nothing. There’s nothing we’re so slapstick with as our own immortal souls.
