# Quote — Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

> “I don’t know,” he admitted.
>
> “Well.” She started pouring tea. “To start things off, what do you think of the world?”
>
> “I don’t know anything.”
>
> “The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.”
>
> “You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years.”
>
> “It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it’s an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn’t life a play? Don’t I play it well?”
>
> They both laughed quietly.

- Author: [Ray Bradbury](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ray-bradbury.md)
- Book: [Dandelion Wine](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ray-bradbury/dandelion-wine.md)
- Page: 142
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury#Dandelion_Wine_(1957)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/ray-bradbury/dandelion-wine/i-dont-know

## More from this book

> “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.”

p. 85 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ray-bradbury/dandelion-wine/no-said-the.md)

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

p. 147 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ray-bradbury/dandelion-wine/kindness-and-intelligence.md)

> 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.

p. 134 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ray-bradbury/dandelion-wine/any-town-new.md)