"I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That's a different thing ... Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad - you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I'll be damned, it's been a good year,"

- Ray Bradbury

Source: Andrew Sullivan

zest and gusto

One cannot write or act without zest and gusto.
- Ray Bradbury paraphrased

Moby-Dick is the literal embodiment of evil

19th century Moby-Dick author Herman Melville is Moby's great-great-great-granduncle.

Ismael:

Sir, I want to see what whaling is like.

Quaker:

Have you seen Ahab; the Captain of the ship? You want to know what whaling is? Then you keep an eye on Captain Ahab. You see a man torn apart from crown to heal and spliced back together with Sperm Whale bone in place of what's missing. His looks tell more than any church sermon about the mortality of man. 

Ishmael:

And a whale did that?

Quaker:

A whale as big as an island.

From the 1956 screenplay of Moby-Dick by John Huston [1906-1987] and Ray Bradbury [born 1920], based on the 1851 novel of the same name by Herman Melville [1819-1891], which is regarded as the finest work of 19th American fiction.