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

by Ray Bradbury

Have a drink!?” “I don’t need it,” said Halloway. “But someone inside me does.” “Who?” The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights. But he couldn’t say that. So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bones that were stacked for burning but never burned.

Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between.

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. So vague, yet so immense. He did not want to live with it. Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it all the rest of his life.

“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.

A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.

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.

The Witch flung one hand up to feel the shape of this audacity which came off the fifty-four-year-old man like a fever.

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