Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury

People forget if they don't keep testing things.

Here was where the big summer-quiet winds lived and passed in the green depths, like ghost whales, unseen.

The reason why grownups and kids fight is because they belong to separate races. Look at them, different from us. Look at us, different from them.

He was a man who did not suffer but pleasured in sleepless nights of brooding on the great clock of the universe running down or winding itself up, who could tell? But many nights, listening, he decided first one way and then the other...

There were a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder.

"Tom," said Douglas, "just promise me one thing, okay?"
"It's a promise. What?"
"You may be my brother and maybe I hate you sometimes, but stick around, all right?"
"You mean you'll let me follow you and the older guys when you go on hikes?"
"Well... sure... even that. What I mean is, don't go away, huh? Don't let any cars run over you or fall off a cliff." "I should say not! Whatta you think I am, anyway?"
"Cause if worst comes to worst, and both of us are real old— say forty or forty-five some day— we can own a gold mine out West and sit there smoking corn silk and growing beards."
"Growing beards! Boy!"
"Like I say, you stick around and don't let nothing happen."
"You can depend on me," said Tom.

"Tom!" Then quieter. "Tom. . .does everyone in the world. . .know he's alive?"
"Sure. Heck, yes!"
"I hope they do," whispered Douglas. "Oh, I sure hope they know."

There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those dam five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there'd be no night!

No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.

What they talked of all evening long, no one remembered next day.

Never in his life a silence like this one. One so utterly complete. Why should the crickets cease? Why? What reason? They'd never stopped ever before. Not ever.

"Tom, if this year's gone like this, what will next year be, better or worse?"
"Don't ask me." Tom blew a tune on a dandelion stem. "I didn't make the world." He thought about it. "Though some days I feel like I did." He spat happily.

Dig in the earth, delve in the soul.

Everything runs backward now. Like matinee films sometimes, where people jump out of water onto diving boards. Come September you push down the windows you pushed up, take off the sneakers you put on, pull on the hard shoes you threw away last June. People run in the house now like birds jumping back inside clocks. One minute, porches loaded, everyone gabbing thirty to a dozen. Next minute, doors slam, talk stops, and leaves fall off trees like crazy.

Find friends, ditch enemies!

Here in the world of people you might give time, money, and prayer with little or no return.