The Illustrated Man Quotes
"The colors burned in three dimensions. They were windows looking in upon fiery reality."
"If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with all his sulphurous color, elongation, and anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s body for his art."
"I haven’t had a job that’s lasted in forty years."
"It’s all right in sunlight, I could keep a carnival day job. But at night—the pictures move. The pictures change."
"Everyone wants to see the pictures, and yet nobody wants to see them."
"When I find that witch I’m going to kill her."
"They follow me along country roads. Everyone wants to see the pictures, and yet nobody wants to see them."
"We’ve had peace here, the first time we ever drew a solid breath."
"We can start all over again, on the same level."
"Maybe we’re looking for peace and quiet. Certainly there’s none on Earth."
"We’re looking for our lost souls, trying to get away from our evil planet to a good one?"
"The Lord’s let us come through, a few here and a few there. And what happens next is up to all of us."
"If children are neurotic at all, a room like that—"
"We’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live."
"They’ve been acting funny ever since you forbade them to take the rocket to New York a few months ago."
"We’ve brought the Earth and civilization down about our heads. None of the cities are worth saving—they’ll be radioactive for a century."
"Anything is fine if it works; the true pragmatist, that’s Burton."
"That’s Burton all right! Flaming in here in a blaze and a halo and a soft word and a loving touch."
"You don’t want to believe. Wake up! It’s morning. This is a real world and we’re real, dirty people."
"Interviewed three dozen people, all of them full of the same milk and hogwash."
"According to this, there were thirty miracles of healing performed, a blind man restored to vision, a leper cured."
"The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain."
"You’re very tired. You’ve traveled a long way and you belong to a tired people who’ve been without faith a long time."
"We are the old Martians, who left our marble cities and went into the hills."
"I could have told him, but he told me and I listened to him."
"All of them. The same dream, with no difference."
"Sometime during the night for us, and then as the night goes on around the world, that’ll go too. It’ll take twenty-four hours for it all to go."
"We have lived apart from those we left behind, those other men of this world."
"In all of my fifty years I never had a dream until that week before we took off from Earth."
"Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them."
"I hate giving up this wonderful atmosphere, this sun, this vacation."
"Sleep will be like a woman to you. You’ll always go back to her, because she’s fresh and good and faithful."
"We can’t let you get away with this escape. Other people in the year 2155 might get the same idea and do what you’ve done."
"I’m a free agent. I don’t belong to anybody."
"If you’d had any sense and done things intelligently, we’d have been friends."
"I have enough power to keep them all happy. You could have shared me, like a community kitchen."
"I’d have felt quite like a god among children, being kind, doing favors."
"In order to make a good fight you got to have a new way of surprising people. That way you win."
"Love will fly if held too lightly, love will die if held too tightly."
"Logic is knowing what things are true and not true."
"Perhaps she saw something from the corners of her eyes; perhaps she smelled a new odor or heard a new noise."
"The children screamed with delight as if at a great fireworks display."
"All the subconscious suspicion and fear that had gathered secretly all afternoon and fermented like a wine in her."
"We’re safe until tonight. Maybe we can sneak out. Maybe we can escape!"
"Hush. Oh, nononononono!" said his wife weakly, holding him. "Please, be quiet. They might go away."
"Fool!" cried Bramante. "You’ll never go. This is a rich man’s world."
"The Future becomes Now! Do we fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us."
"But every night for a month now I’ve been awake. I hear the rockets. I think. And tonight I’ve made up my mind. One of us will fly to Mars!"
"Let them be content with being poor. Turn their eyes down to their hands and to your junk yard, not up to the stars."
"I forgot. School starts. I can’t go. Draw again."
"None of us will go," said Lorenzo. "That’s best," said Maria.
"You are all mine," he said. "Even if you never move or spit fire, and just sit there and rust for fifty years, you are mine."