Juan Ramon Jimenez: "If they give you..."

"If they give you ruled paper,
write the other way."

- Juan Ramon Jimenez, Spanish poet

Ray Bradbury: "There is more than one way..."

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. ... In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book."

- Ray Bradbury, a personal note on censorship in his Coda to Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: "There was a silly damn bird..."

"There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man."

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: "Everyone must leave something behind..."

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built of a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: "That's the wonderful thing about man..."

"That's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing."

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: 3 Necessities

"Where do we go from here? Would books help us?"

"Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two."

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: "We are living..."

"We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam."

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: "The good writers..."

"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rap her and leave her for the flies."

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: "We have everything..."

"We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing... It would be funny if it were not serious."

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: "We need not to be..."

"We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, something real?"

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451