The October Country - Book Cover

June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past.

Ray Bradbury, dandelion wine

“A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least.

You can’t act if you don’t know.”

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

- Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)

From our stacks: Illustration for "A Sound of Thunder," from The Golden Apples of the Sun. Ray Bradbury. With Drawings by Joe Mugnaini. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972.

“Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.”

— Ray Bradbury

“I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.”

— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

October Country

...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noon go quickly, ducks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. 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

Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.

 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance.

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

Some people turn sad awfully young ... No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer, and ... get sadder younger than anyone else in the world.

– Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine