The Martian Chronicles Quotes

#1. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. We'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time ... -Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#2. Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.' #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#3. The thing that makes me happy is that I know that on Mars, two hundred years from now, my books are going to be read. They'll be up on dead Mars with no atmosphere. And late at night, with a flashlight, some little boy is going to peek under the covers and read The Martian Chronicles on Mars. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#4. When I was teaching English and trying to get kids passionate about reading, the most effective weapon I had was 'The Martian Chronicles.' #Quote by Jack McDevitt

#5. Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I'll say yes. They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#6. When I was fifteen, my father gave me a first edition copy of Ray Bradbury's magnificent work, 'The Martian Chronicles.' I had read other science fiction by noted authors, but this book was something else altogether. #Quote by Thomas Steinbeck

#7. Take language, one of the few distinctive human capacities about which much is known. We have very strong reasons to believe that all possible human languages are very similar; a Martian scientist observing humans might conclude that there is just a single language, with minor variants. The reason is that the particular aspect of human nature that underlies the growth of language allows very restricted options. Is this limiting? Of course. Is it liberating? Also of course. It is these very restrictions that make it possible for a rich and intricate system of expression of thought to develop in similar ways on the basis of very rudimentary, scattered, and varied experience. #Quote by Noam Chomsky

#8. Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever. But it's great when the machine films other machines, as in 2001. #Quote by Jacques Rivette

#9. His name is 'Mr. Spock.' And the first view of him can be almost frightening - a face so heavy-lidded and satanic you might almost expect him to have a forked tail. Probably half Martian, he has a slightly reddish complexion and semi-pointed ears. #Quote by Gene Roddenberry

#10. I unzipped my duffel bag and started to rifle through it. "What the hell is all that?" Jesse asked.
"A diamond core drill," I replied. "It can go through cobalt and it lets me use this." I pulled out a
tiny scope camera that had a monitor attached to it. "This lets me see where the grooves are in the
lock. Each groove corresponds to a number on the combination and I just have to line them up."
Jesse and Roux looked at me like I was speaking Martian. "Where do you even get this stuff?"
"Sweet Sixteen present from my parents."
Roux shook her head. "I got a Fabergé egg. What a ripoff. #Quote by Robin Benway

#11. I love superheroes and I love weird horror films ... I could definitely feel that there was a lack of movies like The Martian being made: smart genre movies that can appeal to adults. #Quote by Drew Goddard

#12. It is of course dangerous to set off an explosive device on a spacecraft. #Quote by Andy Weir

#13. [William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation. #Quote by Geoff Dyer

#14. In these cases, the mind knows what it's doing better than the guile, because the mind flows, the guile dams up, that is, the mind stride but the guile limps. And that's no guileless statement, however, and that's no Harvard like, as MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data. #Quote by Jack Kerouac

#15. Also, I'll lose half a liter of water per day to breathing until the humidity in the Hab reaches its maximum and water starts condensing on every surface. Then I'll be licking the walls. Yay. #Quote by Andy Weir

#16. I'd move to Los Angeles if New Zealand and Australia were swallowed up by a tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in England and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack. #Quote by Russell Crowe

#17. Any meeting with Martian command is going to have to wait until after the situation on Ganymede is stabilized. Official diplomatic talks before then are only going to make it seem like we've accepted the new status quo. That was Admiral Nguyen, youngest of the men present. Hawkish. Impressed with himself in the way that successful young men tended to be. General #Quote by James S.A. Corey

#18. CELL

Now look objectively. You have to
admit the cancer cell is beautiful.
If it were a flower, you'd say, How pretty,
with its mauve centre and pink petals

of if a cover for a pulpy thirties
sci-fi magazine. How striking:
as an alien, a success,
all purple eye and jelly tentacles
and spines, or are they gills,
creeping around on granular Martian
dirt red as the inside of the body,

while its tender walls
expand and burst, its spores
scatter elsewhere, take root, like money,
drifting like a fiction or
miasma in and out of people's
brains, digging themselves
industriously in. The lab technician

says, It has forgotten
how to die. But why remember? All it wants is more
amnesia. More life, and more abundantly. to take
more. to eat more. To replicate itself. To keep on
doing those things forever. Such desires
are not unknown. Look in the mirror. #Quote by Margaret Atwood

#19. Fantasy isn't about escape; it's a survival mechanism. It's a way to deal with things that are so much bigger than you are. So I think fantasy is special, something to be cherished and protected because it's a very fragile thing and without it, we're so defenseless, we're paralyzed. #Quote by The Martian Child David Gerrold

#20. The Praying Mantis Visits A Penthouse


The praying Mantis with its length of straw
Out of nowhere's forehead born full armed
Engaged the century at my terrace door.
Focused at inches the dinosaur insect sends
Broadsides of epic stillness at my eye,
Above the deafening projects of the age.
My love, who fears the thunder of its poise,
Has seen it and cries out. The clouds like curls
Fall in my faith as I seize a stick to stop
This Martian raid distilled to a straw with legs,
To wisps of prowess. Bristling with motionlessness
The Mantis prays to the Stick twice armed with Man.
I strike, the stick whistles, shearing off two legs
Which run off by themselves beneath some boards.
The Mantis spreads out tints of batlike wing,
The many colored pennants of its blood,
And hugs my weapon; the frantic greens come out,
the reds and yellows blurt out from the straw,
All sinews doubtless screaming insect death.
Against the railing's edge I knock the stick
Sending that gay mad body into the gulf.
Such noisy trappings in defeat wake doubts.
I search my mind for possible wounds and feel
The victim's body heavy on the victor's heart. #Quote by Oscar Williams

#21. The lady ... is an anomaly to which the western nations of this planet have grown accustomed but which would require a great deal of explanation before a Martian could understand her. #Quote by Emily James Smith Putnam

#22. Scientists at first were skeptical that a kitten-type being could exist in the rare Martian atmosphere. As a test, two Earth kittens were put in a chamber that simulated the Martian air. The diary of this experiment is fascinating:
6:00 A.M.: Kittens appear to sleep.
7:02 A.M.: Kitten wakes, darts from one end of cage to another for no apparent reason.
7:14 A.M.: Kitten runs up wall of cage, leaps onto other kitten for no apparent reason.
7:22 A.M.: Kitten lies on back and punches other kitten for no apparent reason.
7:30 A.M.: Kitten leaps, stops, darts left, abruptly stops, climbs wall, clings for two seconds, falls on head, darts right for no apparent reason.
7:51 A.M.: Kitten parses first sentence of daily newspaper that is at bottom of chamber.
With the exception of the parsing, all behavior is typical of Earth kitten behavior. The parsing activity, which was done with a small ball-point pen, was an anomaly. #Quote by Steve Martin

#23. I wish there were a way to spend more time on the surface. But oh well. 31 sols will have to do. #Quote by Andy Weir

#24. Then I had to invent fire.
NASA put a lot of effort into making sure nothing here can burn. Everything is made of metal or flame-retardant plastic and the uniforms are synthetic. I needed something that could hold a flame, some kind of pilot light. I don't have the skills to keep enough H2 flowing to feed a flame without killing myself. Too narrow a margin there.
After a search of everyone's personal items (hey, if they wanted privacy, they shouldn't have abandoned me on Mars with their stuff) I found my answer.
Martinez is a devout Catholic. I knew that. What I didn't know was he brought along a small wooden cross. I'm sure NASA gave him shit about it, but I also know Martinez is one stubborn son of a bitch.
I chipped his sacred religious item into long splinters using a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. I figure if there's a God, He won't mind, considering the situation I'm in.
If ruining the only religious icon I have leaves me vulnerable to Martian vampires, I'll have to risk it.
There were plenty of wires and batteries around to make a spark. But you can't just ignite wood with a small electric spark. So I collected ribbons of bark from local palm trees, then got a couple of sticks and rubbed them together to create enough friction to…
No not really. I vented pure oxygen at the stick and gave it a spark. It lit up like a match. #Quote by Andy Weir

#25. In 1990 I did a story with Helena Christensen about a woman who lives in a trailer in the middle of the desert and finds a little crushed UFO with a martian who has survived the crash. She takes him home, and they fall in love. Later he has to meet with his fellow martians who have arrived to rescue him. It's a sad ending. This was my first truly narrative story and apparently the first narrative story in fashion photography. #Quote by Peter Lindbergh

#26. The last Martian report station on Earth was established in the Pyrenees. #Quote by L. Ron Hubbard

#27. the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere are expected to be showered by Siding Spring - perhaps briefly, perhaps more extensively. Shock waves may rock the atmosphere. #Quote by Anonymous

#28. He should have known better because, early in his learnings under his brother Mahmoud, he had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern. Or so he seemed to grok. Short human words were never like a short Martian word - such as "grok" which forever meant exactly the same thing. Short human words were like trying to lift water with a knife. #Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

#29. Ii do not walk with alienation everywhere I go in the world. I have been to small taverns in rural Ohio, big city bars, San Francisco bath houses, and in all these have felt welcome and happy. But walking through that sunglassed throng, I felt like a Martian. I didn't hate the feeling - indeed, being a black woman in the academy, it wasn't new to me - but it was interesting. I kept wondering: where is the performance? When will the performance start? Is this the performance - me walking through this space without sunglasses with all these Nordic quasi-hipster white people in multi-colored, motorcycle cop sunglasses? #Quote by Gabrielle Civil

#30. During the next few years I wrote a series of Martian pensées, Shakespearean "asides," wandering thoughts, long night visions, predawn half-dreams. The French, like St. John Perce, practice this to perfection. It is the half-poem, half-prose paragraph that runs as little as one hundred words or as long as a full page on any subject, summoned by weather, time, architectural facade, fine wine, good victuals, a view of the sea, quick sunsets, or a long sunrise. From these elements one upchucks rare hairballs or a maundering Hamlet-like soliloquy. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#31. The storm that batters the magnolia's
impermeable leaves, the long-drawn drum roll
of Martian thunder with its hail
...
lighting that makes stark-white the trees,
the walls, suspending them –
interminable instant – marbled manna
and cataclysm – #Quote by Geoffrey Hill After Montale

#32. I originally wrote 'The Martian' as a free serial novel, posting one chapter at a time to my website. #Quote by Andy Weir

#33. What did happen to Mars, anyway? Our next door neighbor,
the Red Planet, apparently was once covered with flowing rivers.
What happened to them? Rivers suggest an atmosphere. Where is it?
Was Mars once a vital, thriving planet? If so, why does it now appear
dead? Could a lifeform on its surface have proliferated so abundantly
and so recklessly that it altered the planet's atmosphere, thereby
knocking it off-kilter and destroying it? Is that what's happening to
our own planet? Will it be our legacy in this solar system to leave
behind another lonely, dead rock to revolve around the sun? Or will
we simply destroy ourselves while the Earth, stronger than her
Martian brother, overcomes our influence and survives to flourish
another billion years - without us? #Quote by Joseph C. Jenkins

#34. The mechanic had laid out two suits of their Martian-made light combat armour, a number of rifles and shotguns, and stacks of ammunition and explosives.
"What," Holden said, "is all this?"
"You said to gear up for the drop."
"I meant, like, underwear and toothbrushes. #Quote by James S.A. Corey

#35. Today I'm on tell you bout a man from outer space." She just loves hearing about peoples from outer space. Her favorite show on the tee-vee is My Favorite Martian, I pull on my antennae hats I shaped last night out a tin foil, fasten em on our heads. One for her and one for me. We look like we a couple a crazy people in them things.
"One day, a wise Martian come down to Earth to teach us people a thing or two," I say.
"Martian? How big?"
"oh, he about six-two."
"What's his name?"
"Martian Luther King."
She take a deep breath and lean her head down on my shoulder. I feel her three-year-old heart racing against mine, flapping like butterflies on my white uniform.
"He was a real nice Martian, Mister King. Looked just like us, nose, mouth, hair up on his head, but sometime people looked at him funny and sometime, well, I guess sometime people was just downright mean."
I coul get in a lot a trouble telling her these little stories, especially with Mister Leefolt. But Mae Mobley know these our "secret stories".
"Why Aibee? Why was they so mean to him?" she ask.
"Cause he was green. #Quote by Kathryn Stockett

#36. Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. "But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#37. If ruining the only religious icon I have leaves me vulnerable to Martian vampires, I'll have to risk it. #Quote by Andy Weir

#38. Could have cried aloud in exultation when my scrutiny disclosed the almost invisible incrustation of particles of carbonized electrons which are thrown off by these Martian torches. It #Quote by Edgar Rice Burroughs

#39. In other news, It's seven sols till the harvest, and I still haven't prepared. For starters, I need to make a hoe. Also, I need to make an outdoor shed for the potatoes. I can't just pile them up outside. The next major storm would cause The Great Martian Potato Migration. #Quote by Andy Weir

#40. What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions ... #Quote by Marvin Minsky

#41. How did I end up in this situation? I'm the district sales manager of a napkin factor. Why is my daughter in space? #Quote by Andy Weir

#42. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#43. What the fuck are you talking about?" I asked, wondering if I was in some crazy surrealist movie, wandering from telepathic sheriffs to homosexual assassins, to nympho lady Masons, to psychotic pirates, according to a script written in advance by two acid-heads and a Martian humorist. #Quote by Robert Shea