Farewell Summer Quotes

“Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. It's like boats. You keep your motor on so you can steer with the current. And when you hear the sound of the waterfall coming nearer and nearer, tidy up the boat, put on your best tie and hat, and smoke a cigar right up till the moment you go over. That's a triumph.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“I never in my life argued with a piece of cake or a bowl of ice cream.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“[He] was always here to offer cups of good clear Walden Pond, or shout down the deep well of Shakespeare and listen, with satisfaction, for echoes. Here the lion and the hartebeest lay together, here the jackass became a unicorn.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“The wind whistled, was cool: it was an early autumn evening, no longer a late summer one.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“THERE ARE THOSE DAYS WHICH SEEM A TAKING in of breath which, held, suspends the whole earth in its waiting. Some summers refuse to end.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“So along the road those flowers spread that, when touched, give down a shower of autumn rust. By every path it looks as if a ruined circus had passed and loosed a trail of ancient iron at every turning of a wheel. The rust was laid out everywhere, strewn under trees and by riverbanks and near the tracks themselves where once a locomotive had gone but went no more. So flowered flakes and railroad track together turned to moulderings upon the rim of autumm.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“— Трябва да се научиш как да не се вкопчваш, преди да се научиш как да придобиваш. Животът трябва да бъде докосван, а не удушаван. Трябва да се отпуснеш, понякога да оставяш нещата да се случват, а друг път да се движиш заедно с тях. Също като с лодките. Поддържаш мотора включен, за да я насочваш по течението. И когато чуеш шума на водопада все по-близо, разтребваш в лодката, слагаш си най-хубавата шапка и вратовръзка и си пушиш пурата чак до мига, когато пропадаш. И това е истинска победа. Не се опитвай да спориш с бездната.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Think I'll go eat me a doughnut and take me a nap.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“We gotta stand still! Stay the age we are. Grow up? Hah! All you do then is marry someone who screams at you!”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Some summers refuse to end.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Grow up and you turn into burglars and get shot, or worse, they make you wear a coat and tie and stash you in the First National Bank behind brass bars! We gotta stand still! Stay the age we are. Grow up? Hah! All you do then is marry someone who screams at you!”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Is death being on a ship sailing and all your folks left back on the shore?”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Douglas eyed a high cloud passing that had never been that shape before and would never be that shape again.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Midnight, said the clock. Time, it said, Darkness. Flights of night birds flew up to carry the final peal away, out over the lake and into the night country, gone.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“He surveyed the lake of grass below, all the dandelions gone, a touch of rust in the trees, and the smell of Egypt blowing from the far east.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Charlie scratched inside his left ear. Everybody. The first war in history where everybody won. I can't figure it. So long." He went on up the sidewalk, crossed the front yard, opened the door of his house, waved, and was gone.

"There goes Charlie," said Douglas.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Bleak pushed the chair around a corner so the light of the dying sun stained their faces a healthy red, and added, "Look, life gives us everything. Then it takes it away. Youth, love, happiness, friends. Darkness gets it all in the end. We didn't have enough sense to know you can will it-life-to others. Your looks, your youth. Pass it on. Give it away. It's lent to us for only a while. Use it, let go without crying. It's a very fancy relay race, heading God knows where. Except now, in your last lap of the race, you find no one waiting for you on the track ahead. Nobody for you to hand the stick to.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“The leaf-light flickered on the paper-thin skin of the old men's wrists, the shadows alternating with fading sunlight. They moved in a soft whisper.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“GRANDPA’S LIBRARY WAS A FINE DARK PLACE bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“... my aunt Neva was the guardian and gardener of the metaphors that became me. She saw to it that I was fed all the best fairy tales, poetry, cinema, and theater, so that I was continually in a fever about life and eager to write it all down.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“I woke this morning and said to myself, ‘Charlie, this is swell, living. Keep doing it!”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“Suddenly, he needed the gun again, to touch the shape of killing, like touching that wild old man.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer