Ray Bradbury

The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile.

O autumn winds that bake and burn

And all the world to darkness turn,

Now storm and seize and make of me…

A swarm of leaves from Autumn’s Tree!

“What’s happening, Mr. Moundshroud? Where are we?”

Moundshroud struck a flinty finger into fire and held it up. “Why, bless me, boys. It’s the Dark Ages. The longest darkest night ever.”

It’s big, it’s broad…

It’s broad, it’s bright…

It fills the sky of All Hallow’s Night…

The strangest sight you’ve ever seen.

The Monster Tree on Halloween.

Mr. Moundshroud, who are YOU?

And Mr. Moundshroud, way up there on the roof, sent his thoughts back:

I think you know, boy, I think you know.

Will we meet again, Mr. Moundshroud?

Many years from now, yes, I’ll come for you.

And a last thought from Tom:

O Mr. Moundshroud, will we EVER stop being afraid of nights and death?

And the thought returned:

When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.

The days of the Long Cold are done. Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in the winter cave.

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.

“No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns.”

Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you’re twenty.

And the odd thing in Dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy.

Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another.

Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple.