bRAdburY speaks: Ray Bradbury
I recently read a collection of essays by Mr Bradbury. In it, I was reminded of how little I knew about writing, and enjoyed myself as I highlighted phrases and sentences that I would have never thought about. Interesting reading, though the man is borderline crazy therefore some of his ramblings were really out there.
For history and science fiction are inseparable.
Everything that we do has to be imagined first.
Sometimes an idea is of such size that by its very loom and weight, it seizes other ideas swiftly toward it in collision.
Sometimes the stars move, sometimes the firefly holds still; then the reverse. The caterpillar worm in chrysalis imagines wings, then cracks its coffin to rise as a new creature, forgetful of the old.
I write this to open your eyes. Or, if they are already open, to lift them to where the motionless stars write moving histories on the air.
I was a teenage thirty-three.
We don't ask who Napoleon was, but where buried. Or not why he invaded Russia, but when. In sum, we wear our hearts on our sleaze.
Ask them to give back their fortunes and hand us real news.
The bottom line is, if you stare like stunned deer in mid road, blinded by the lights that rush to run you down, you must expect that a thousand and one such nights in such a brutal harem will convince you that the end of the world is at hand, that America is bestial, and that suicide, murder, rape and AIDS are the fashion of the day.
Yes, we have met the enemy, and they are us...
The love of power, which as could easily be predicted, didn't love back but only corrupted.
Invent the future, build it while no one is looking. Dream the cliché-impossible-dream that everyone doubts and no one believes in until they wind up next door to or surrounded by it and, too late, they're in love.
For history and science fiction are inseparable.
Everything that we do has to be imagined first.
Sometimes an idea is of such size that by its very loom and weight, it seizes other ideas swiftly toward it in collision.
Sometimes the stars move, sometimes the firefly holds still; then the reverse. The caterpillar worm in chrysalis imagines wings, then cracks its coffin to rise as a new creature, forgetful of the old.
I write this to open your eyes. Or, if they are already open, to lift them to where the motionless stars write moving histories on the air.
I was a teenage thirty-three.
We don't ask who Napoleon was, but where buried. Or not why he invaded Russia, but when. In sum, we wear our hearts on our sleaze.
Ask them to give back their fortunes and hand us real news.
The bottom line is, if you stare like stunned deer in mid road, blinded by the lights that rush to run you down, you must expect that a thousand and one such nights in such a brutal harem will convince you that the end of the world is at hand, that America is bestial, and that suicide, murder, rape and AIDS are the fashion of the day.
Yes, we have met the enemy, and they are us...
The love of power, which as could easily be predicted, didn't love back but only corrupted.
Invent the future, build it while no one is looking. Dream the cliché-impossible-dream that everyone doubts and no one believes in until they wind up next door to or surrounded by it and, too late, they're in love.
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