Dandelion Wine (Green Town, #1)

by Ray Bradbury

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

I blundered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see.

And, of course, the more water you dip out the more flows in. The flow has never ceased.

Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.

And, after all, isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.

Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

He liked to listen to the silence, he said, if silence could be listened to, for, he went on, in that silence you could hear

wildflower pollen sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air! Listen! the waterfall of birdsong beyond those trees!

“Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.”