"Once you let yourself begin to be..." - Quote by Ray Bradbury

“I'll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags.”

“Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.”

“People try to force things. It's disastrous. Just leave your mind alone. Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.”

“...But we enjoyed playing games and were punished for them by men who played games themselves. However, grown-up games are known as 'business' and even though boys' games are much the same, they are punished for them by their elders. No one pities either the boys or the men, though surely we deserve pity, for I cannot believe that a good judge would approve of the beatings I received as a boy on the ground that my games delayed my progress in studying subjects which would enable me to play a less creditable game later in life.”

“And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.”

“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.”

“True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.”

“The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.”

“The nation is divided, half patriots and half traitors, and no man can tell which from which.”