“Bees Do Have A Smell, You Know, And If They Don’t They Should, For Their Feet Are Dusted With Spices

The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.

R is for Rocket, Ray Bradbury

Vintage Paperback - Assignment In Tomorrow by Frederik Pohl

Lancer (1972)

“I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing."

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason.

—Ray Bradbury

The Small Assassin, Ray Bradbury

“Beware the autumn people.”

— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy.

Something is missing... It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

Ray Bradbury

the rocket man

“Doug,” he said, about five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our towels and heading back along the beach near the surf. “I want you to promise me something.

“Don’t ever be a rocket man.”

I stopped.

“I mean it,” he said, “because when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that. Don’t let it get hold of you.

“You don’t know what it is. Every time I’m out there I think, if I ever get back to Earth I’ll stay there, I’ll never go out again. But I go out and I guess I’ll always go out.”

“I’ve thought about being a Rocket Man for a long time,” I said.

He didn’t hear me. “I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I started trying so damned hard to stay here.”

I remembered him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing and listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and the towns and the land and his family were the only real things and the good things. But I knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion from our front porch.

“Promise me you won’t be like me,” he said.

ray bradbury, maclean's magazine, march 1, 1951

"It was a pleasure to burn."