12 quotes
The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating when you’re twenty.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
Next year’s going to be even bigger, days will be brighter, nights longer and darker, more people dying, more babies born, and me in the middle of it all.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
The sun did not rise, it overflowed.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
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.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
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.
Dandelion Wine (1957)
“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.”
Dandelion Wine (1957)
I’m not afraid. When you live as long as I’ve lived, you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I’d never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can’t say I’m greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don’t fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it.
Dandelion Wine (1957)