September Loneliness

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine (William Morrow Paperbacks; April 23, 2013) (via Cultural Offering)

“Why haven’t I stopped to think and smell the last thirty years?”

— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

The October Country - Book Cover

When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, some day it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.

― Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

“I’ll hold on to the world tight some day. I’ve got one finger on it now; that’s a beginning.”

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"It was a pleasure to burn."

“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, about something real?”  - Ray Bradbury

McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he switched it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fish skin glittering in webs between the finger-like projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a cauldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.

Illustration by Aleta Jenks for The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury.