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Quote by Ray Bradbury

“And I? thought Hollis. What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If only I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me! But there’s no one here but myself, and how can you do good all alone? You can’t. Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth’s atmosphere.”

Quote by Ray Bradbury

Work

Kaleidoscope: Short Story by Ray Bradbury

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Author

Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, born on August 22, 1920, and died on June 5, 2012, was an influential American science fiction writer, playwright, and poet. His works are known for their unique imagination and profound philosophical insights, which have had a profound impact on the science fiction genre. more

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“I scrubbed at my face. Perhaps it was the quiet, the hollowness of the past few days- perhaps it was only that I no longer had to think hour to hour about how to keep my family alive, but... it was regret, and maybe shame, that coated my tongue, my bones. I shuddered, as if I could fling it off, and kicked back the sheets to rise from the bed.”

“Have I just made the biggest mistake of my life? Forsaking everything I'd known--home, family, friends, and the security of being a part of a community regardless of how dysfunctional? I didn't care about losing the privilege of being a soldier in God's End-Time Army, but I did wonder if they might be right about Hell. I wondered if freedom was really worth all this uncertainty and the what-ifs.”

“I was there long before you were born, he wanted to say. I've known this kanamaluka [River Tamar] longer than I've known your mother. And as he cast around for what that meant, how important his connection to the river was, his mind snagged on the little boat he'd once owned. How he'd freed it from a prison of thick lead paint. He wanted to tell is daughters about the glory he'd restored it to. How intoxicating the sight of it had been. How the scent of its timber had put him under a spell he had never truly recovered from. What discovering Huon pine does to a person. How it had rode the river so cleanly, so joyously, like a wish come true. How short his time with it was, how hard the summer had been, how he'd sold the boat to a rich little man, a stranger whose name he soon forgot. How it never carried him to the river mouth. I didn't get to go back, he wanted to tell his daughters. I didn't get to return to the place my father took us, your uncles and me, where the mad whale - do you remember the mad whale, do you remember the stories, did anyone ever tell you? - raised its twelve-foot tail above our borrowed boat, hiding the moon's light, poised to smash us into red flotsam. Only it didn't, he wanted to say. It could've, but it didn't. With colossal gentleness it lowered its flukes into the water beside us. Loosed a spray of vapour from its blowhole. Rolled onto its back and exposed to us the creamy striations of its belly. Twisted through the water so that the hugeness of its eye was close to us, a couple of yards from the boat. An eye shockingly familiar in its mammalian warmth. An eye filled with starlight: an eye lit by a half-dark heaven. (p.199)”

“It can be a blast when good people and good laughs teleport you back to the way it once was. But you poison yourself with the past when you constantly stab and inject yourself with vain memories that rubberband you back to the way it used to be! Your task of escape is to bring all the past dope shit into your present moment and let it guide the new path you will take, to the future that YOU choose to deliberately create!”