The October Country Quotes

“The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it.

- The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic. ”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“I was only twelve. But I knew how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that was no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long Autumn days of the years past when I carried her books home from school.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“If she fell, if she broke, you'd find a million fragments in the morning. Bright crystal and clear wine on the parquet flooring, that's all you'd see at dawn.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it's too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing - a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and - irritable murder. Irritable murder, there's a pretty and terrifying phrase for you.

- Touched with Fire”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“..love cushions all your irritations, unnatural instincts, hatreds and immaturities.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Don't they get afraid, then?"
"They have a religion for that.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the moist swampland. One of those things in a big jar that makes your stomach jump as it does when you see a preserved arm in a laboratory vat.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“I suppose it's an unconscious little stream of wit that flows quietly under everything I do or say.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they're fascinated with the snake-pit. ”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“People die every day, psychologically speaking. Some part of them gets tired. And that small part tries to kill off the entire person.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Well, I've kept you waiting long enough," he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Cerrando los ojos, volviendo la cabeza, escuchando. Oh que viento solitario. México es un país raro. Todo selvas y desiertos y extensiones solitarias y aquí y allí un pueblo pequeño como éste, con unaa pocas luces encendidas que puedes apagar con un castañeo de los dedos.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Once in a lifetime anyway, it's nice to make a mistake if you think it'll do somebody some good," she”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“...toward that suddenly brilliant town called Obscurity by a dazzling seashore called The Past.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“He had seen her painted sign by the road: Skin Illustration! Illustration instead of tattoo! Artistic!”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Sobbing wildly, he rose above the grain and hewed to left and right over and over and over! He sliced out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat, with no selection and no care, cursing, swearing, the blade swinging up in the sun and falling with a singing whistle!
Bombs shattered London, Moscow, and Tokyo. The kilns of Belsen and Buchenwald took fire.
The blade sang, crimson wet.
Mushrooms vomited out blind suns at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The grain wept in a green rain, falling.
Korea, Indo-China, Egypt, India trembled; Asia stirred, Africa woke in the night . . .
And the blade went on rising, crashing, severing, with the fury and the rage of a man who has lost and lost so much that he no longer cares what he does to the world.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Mom? What do they do in the graveyard, Mom, under the ground? Just lay there?"
"Lie there."
"Lie there? Is that all they do? It doesn't sound like much fun."
"For goodness' sake, it's not made out to be fun."
"Why don't they jump up and run around once in a while if they get tired lying there? God's pretty silly--"
"Martin!"
"Well, you'd think He'd treat people better than to tell them to lie still for keeps. That's impossible. Nobody can do it! I tried once. Dog tries. I tell him, 'dead Dog!' He plays dead awhile, then gets sick and tired and wags his tail or opens one eye and looks at me, bored. Boy, I bet sometimes those graveyard people do the same, huh, Dog?"
Dog barked.
"Be still with that kind of talk!" said Mother.
Martin looked off into space.
"Bet that's exactly what they do," he said.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“And with the trick, much admired by magicians, of sitting in a green velour chair and-vanishing! Turn your head and you forgot his face. Vanilla pudding.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“A red ganglion, no bigger than a scarlet thread, snapped and quivered; a nerve, no greater than a red linen fiber twisted. Deep in her one little mech was gone and the entire machine, imbalanced, was about to steadily shake itself to bits.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“Moreno, Morelos, Cantine, Gomez, Gutierrez, Villanousul, Ureta, Licon, Navarro, Iturbi; Jorge, Filomena, Nena, Manuel, Jose, Tomas, Ramona. This man walked and this man sang and this man had three wives; and this man died of this, and that of that, and the third from another thing, and the fourth was shot, and the fifth was stabbed and the sixth fell straight down dead; and the seventh drank deep and died dead, and the eighth died in love, and the ninth fell from him horse, and the tenth coughed blood, and the eleventh stopped his heart, and the twelfth used to laugh much, and the thirteenth was a dancing one, and the fourteenth was most beautiful of all, the fifteenth had ten children and the sixteenth is one of those children as is the seventeenth; and the eighteenth was Tomas and did well with his guitar; the next three cut maize in their fields, had three lovers each; the twenty-second was never loved; the twenty-third sold tortillas, patting and shaping them each at the curb before the Opera House with her little charcoal stove; and the twenty-fourth beat his wife and now she walks proudly in the town and is merry with new men and here he stands bewildered by this unfair thing, and the twenty-fifth drank several quarts of river with his lungs and was pulled forth in a net, and the twenty-sixth was a great thinker and his brain now sleeps like a burnt plum in his skull.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country