MORE "DANDELION WINE"

DIPPING AGAIN into my book of quotations that resonated with me, here are some more passages from "Dandelion Wine". It's a semi-autobiographical novel set in small town America in 1928 reminiscent of the author's own boyhood. I'm not a science fiction reader, or I would by now have devoured all of Ray Bradbury's books........... his way with words is exceptionally fine. See if you agree......

 "About seven o'clock you could hear the chairs scraping back from the tables, someone experimenting with a yellow-toothed piano, if you stood outside the dining-room window and listened. Matches being struck, the first dishes bubbling in the suds and tinkling on the wall racks, somewhere, faintly, a phonograph playing. And then as the evening changed the hour,  at house after house, on the twilight streets, under the immense oaks and elms, on shady porches, people would begin to appear, like those figures who tell good or bad weather in rain-or-shine clocks."



"(Summer) began on a morning such as this when a boarder, a nephew, a cousin, a son or a grandson came out on the lawn below and moved in consecutively smaller quadrangles north and east and south and west with a clatter of rotating metal through the sweet summer grass."






"A darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible."











"'My gosh, if you're going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would've talked about next month, the month after!'

'It's just, if I didn't see those windows until today, what else did I miss? And what about all the things I did see here in town? Will I be able to remember them when I go away?'"





"And last of all, the children, who had been off squinting their way through a last hide-and-seek or kick-the-can, panting, glowing, would sickle quietly back like boomerangs along the soundless lawn, to sink beneath the talking talking talking of the porch voices which would weigh and gentle them down.........

"Books had instant replay 

long before televised sports."           

                                 ~Bern Williams