What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of expressing both the positive and negative experiences in our lives.
Ray Bradbury's quote encourages us to reflect on the significant moments in our lives, both good and bad, and to find the courage to openly share them. By recognizing and articulating these experiences, we can better understand ourselves and connect with others, fostering deeper relationships and personal growth.
In practice
In a motivational speech encouraging people to share their stories.
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer. Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview (Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)
I never went to college, so I went to the library.
There must be something in books, something we canβt imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You donβt stay for nothing.
I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour.
The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.
Life's not breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away.
Many people try to avoid pressure, yet the absence of any tension or pressure usually creates a sense of boredom and the lackluster experience of life that so many people complain about.
That's because you've never been one. You haven't spent years wearing someone else's clothes, taking someone else's name, living in someone else's houses, and working someone else's job to fit in. And if you don't sell out, then you run away... proving you're the Gypsy they said you were all along.
Is that a birthday? 'tis, alas! too clear; 'Tis but the funeral of the former year.
He's worked his entire life and he's never lived a single moment, I mean not a moment, in the real world.
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