"Farewell Summer" Quotes

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight - Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck - tonight you could almost taste time.

For, unless one is refreshed by new symbols and pictures, one will be longing always for the old ones that have lost their capacity to excite.

The first thing you learn about emotion, the first day you feel it, is that no emotion is ever simple.

I have to be on top of the pile. That’s the only place to be. I’m on top of the pile and I’m not going to fall off, not into the middle of the pile, anyway.

Here, the old ones made new for us, for our time, for the time in the middle of our lives, the time when we are still young but have learned to hate.

But I was never afraid. I was never afraid of anything. I was always afraid.

That’s it, I think. I’m not going to worry anymore.

It was the first touch of autumn that he had felt. It was the last touch of summer, too. And the first touch of death. And, to him, who had never died, not yet, it did not seem so bad.

A life isn't much of a life without the things one remembers.

They would be lost without each other. They would run wild, become savages, disappear. They would give up their dreams, their futures. They would become ordinary.