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RIP, Ray Bradbury. I can’t claim to having read all of his works, or even enough to call myself a Ray Bradbury superfan, if you will. But I am, and always will be, for the timeless classic that is “Fahrenheit 451’. Few books hit me like a freight train full of words, significance and intellectual heft like that one. Could easily re-read anytime, probably will now knowing he’s passed. Forever indebted to him for my favorite passage in any book. I first learned of it from my brother when he quoted it during his salutatorian speech at high school graduation. And it resonated so that I asked my aunt to read it at my wedding. And you might ask why I’d have something not about love, relationships or romantic unions read at a wedding. And all I can say is that, though I’m as silly a soul as you’ll ever know, that these words kinda define why I do what I do, and how I feel about living life and the effort we put forth while we’re here.

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”


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R.I.P. Ray Bradbury: The “Fahrenheit 451” author, who wrote numerous other literary classics in his day, died Wednesday at 91. ”If I had to make any statement, it would be how much I love and miss him, and I look forward to hearing everyone’s memories about him,” Danny Karapetian, Bradbury’s grandson, said to io9. Sad news. (edit: Karapetian is his grandson; apologies, fixed)

What a bummer. Bradbury just wrote a short New Yorker piece about how he got into science-fiction.

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