Dandelion Wine Quotes
"Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow."
"A whole summer ahead to cross off the calendar, day by day."
"He would be clothed in trees and bushes and rivers."
"The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered."
"Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass."
"Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky."
"The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere."
"Death was the waxen effigy in the coffin when he was six and Great-grandfather passed away."
"You greatly admire skeletons and I like fingerprints; well and good."
"A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car."
"Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher."
The Happiness Machine," he said. "The Happiness Machine.
"You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper."
"The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests."
"It's just, if I didn't see these windows until today, what else did I miss?"
"You’re only the second most clumsy woman in Green Town, Illinois."
"You can’t afford to have your milk sour, your bread fall, or your cakes as flat as wheels."
"You can't sit down without playing the chair like an accordion."
"You can't go a hundred years. That's really traveling. That's really some machine."
"And now here we come, you and me, along the same track, but further on, and so much looking and snuffing and handling things to do."
"You’re not even close!" John turned away. "No, sir."
"Once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present."
"No, my dear, you’re not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You’re not these trunks of junk and dust. You’re only you, here, now—the present you."
"Yes, that was it. She smiled. Deeper in the warm snow hill she turned her head upon her pillow. That was better. Now, yes, now she saw it shaping in her mind quietly, and with a serenity like a sea moving along an endless and self-refreshing shore. Now she let the old dream touch and lift her from the snow and drift her above the scarce-remembered bed."
"Somewhere a door closed quietly. 'That’s better.' Alone she snuggled luxuriously down through the warm snowbank of linen and wool, sheet and cover, and the colors of the patchwork quilt were bright as the circus banners of old time."
"It’s all right,' whispered Great-grandma, as the dream floated her. 'Like everything else in this life, it’s fitting.'"
"Douglas watched them go. They departed like the pale fragments of a final twilight in the history of a dying world. They went like the few remaining shreds of warm hope from his hand."
"Douglas’s teeth chattered, his heart pumped sludge in his chest. He shut his eyes and let the convulsion shake him."
"Douglas knew why the arcade had drawn him so steadily this week and drew him still tonight. For there was a world completely set in place, predictable, certain, sure."
"Old man Black, all the time screaming at her, threatening to kill her. 'You can’t kill what’s never lived, Doug.'"
"A hot night, not a breath stirring, in August."
"Everything runs backward now. Like matinee films sometimes, where people jump out of water onto diving boards."
"Douglas in the high cupola above the town, moved his hand. ‘Everyone, clothes off!’"
"June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head."
"The most people did was stand in the kitchen door and peer at the baking-powder explosions, enjoy the clangs and rattles and bangs like a factory gone wild where Grandma stared half blindly about, letting her fingers find their way among canisters and bowls."
"Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began?"
"And by the time it reaches the table tomorrow at twilight it will be delicate, succulent, brown and tender as the breast of the autumn pheasant."
"They worked with him silently for a time and then Douglas, bent in his own shadow, said: ‘Tom, if this year’s gone like this, what will next year be, better or worse?’"
"It was a high sad voice rising and falling. It was a clear voice and it was in tune. You could not make out the words."
"He slept and dreamed. In the dream the bell was ringing and all of them were yelling and rushing down to breakfast."
"Whoever he was or whatever he was and no matter how different and crazy he seemed, he was not crazy."
"I remember years like that," said the junkman.
"There’s only one magic philter will fix Mr. Black," said Tom. "Soon’s he gets enough pennies any one evening, he—well, let’s see."
"This way, you get to live the summer over for a minute or two here or there along the way through the winter, and when the bottles are empty the summer’s gone for good and no regrets and no sentimental trash lying about for you to stumble over forty years from now."
"You just can’t pay. What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving."