There Will Come Soft Rains

by

Ray Bradbury

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Fire is portrayed as a clever and worthy adversary of the house. Even when snake-like tubes release fire repellant, the flames wrap around the outside of the house and attack the attic (the house’s brain). The fact that the fire ultimately conquers the house underscores the immense power of nature is in comparison with anything humans create.

Fire Quotes in There Will Come Soft Rains

The There Will Come Soft Rains quotes below are all either spoken by Fire or refer to Fire. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Life vs. Technology Theme Icon
).
There Will Come Soft Rains Quotes

At ten o’clock the house began to die. The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!

Related Characters: The House, Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

Related Characters: Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.

Related Characters: The House, Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air.

Related Characters: The House, Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.

Related Characters: The House, Clock, Robot Mice, The Voice Reading Poetry, Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
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