Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town, #2)

by Ray Bradbury

God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.

Suddenly they were awfully small in too large a room in too big a town and much too huge a world.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

our hour is short, eternity is long. With this knowledge came pity and mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love.

“So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do both, depending on the season and the need.

We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

“Why, most men jump at the chance to give up everything for nothing.

Need, want, desire, we burn those in our fluids, oxidize those in our souls, which jet streams out lips, nostrils, eyes, ears,

Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.

Did friends last forever, then? For eternity, could they be counted to a warm, round, and handsome sum?

I will simply hold you and watch you poison yourself.

Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back.

I’ll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags.

Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts.

When I had run out of gas, Mr. Electrico said, “We’ve met before.” “Oh, no, sir,” I said, “this is the first time Ie’ve ever talked to you.” “No, no,” he said, “you were my best friend at the battle of the Ardennes Forest outside Paris in October 1918, were wounded, and died in my arms. And here you are with a new face, new name, but the light coming from your eyes is the soul of my lost friend. Welcome back to the world.”