Цитаты из книги Dandelion Wine

The moon had begun to rise.

Upstairs, on his bed, Douglas breathed.
It was a sound like a sharp knife going in and out, in and out, of a sheath.

Four o’clock in the afternoon. Flies dead on the pavement. Shadows herded under trees. Downtown stores shut up and locked. The lake shore empty.

“Yes, we’ll gather at the river . .

And he went the way of the trolley,

“Happiness, Doug, here goes happiness!”

and it trailed glorious clouds and it put out your eyes like the sun.

His thoughts were heavy and barely ticked like seed pellets falling in an hourglass slow one by falling one. Tick.

John fell down the elm-tree corridor like someone falling down an endless summer well, dwindling away.

They put the ice in handkerchiefs on his face and along his body. They drew the shades and made the room like a cave.

hesitated like a man plunging into the outer rim of hell,

“Doug, you awake?”

“Come on, Doug. We’ll drown in the river all day.”
<…>
Boy, this house’ll burn down today.”

The sidewalks were haunted by dust ghosts

a doll or a game they had grown tired of, something the fun had gone out of, like the flavor from gum, and now it was time for it to pass on to some other part of town where, seen for the first time, it would be revivified and would revivify others.

in the shadow pools under trees,

They both stood looking at the merciless unclouded sky like a camera that has broken and stares, at a motionless and stricken town dying in a fiery sweat.

“Gosh, right down the main street we go, all four of us, you, me, Dad, the witch! Dad’s one in a million!”

I’ll live forever, or next thing to it.”

He looked at Mr. Black sitting there finishing off his bottle and cursing, not knowing how lucky he was, living in the arcade.