Writerjack @ MindSay

day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the
ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across
the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time
and all of the fog there ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty
bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the
door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like birds flying
south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard,
cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that
whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer,
and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns.
I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and
whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of
life."

"The Fog Horn", Ray Bradbury


"I look at these little children's faces going by. And I sometimes think, 
What a shame, what a shame, that all these flowers have to be cut, all these
bright fires have to be put out. What a shame these, all of these you see in
schools or running by, have to get tall and unsightly and wrinkle and turn
gray or get bald, and finally, all bone and wheeze, be dead and buried off
away. When I hear them laugh, I can't believe they'll ever go the road I'm
going. Yet here they come! I still remember Wordsworth's poem: 'When all at
one I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the
trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze'. That's how I think of children,
cruel as they sometimes are, mean as I know they can be, but not yet showing
the meaness around their eyes or in their eyes, not yet full of tiredness.
They are so eager for everything! I guess that's what I miss most in older
folks, the eagerness gone nine times out of ten, the freshness gone, so
much of the drive and life down the drain. I like to watch school let out
each day. It's like someone threw a bunch of flowers out the school front
doors. How does it feel, Willie? How does it feel to be young forever?
To look like a silver dime new from the mint? Are you happy? Are you as
fine as you seem?"

"Hail and Farewell", Ray Bradbury



"Is this how it was over a century ago, she wondered, when the women, the night
before, lay ready for sleep, or not ready, in the small towns of the East,
and heard the sound of horses in the night and the creak of the Conestoga
wagons ready to go, the brooding of oxen under the trees, and the cry of
children already lonely before their time? All the sounds of arrivals and
departures into the deep forests and fields, the blacksmiths working in their
own red hells through midnight? And the smell of bacon and hams ready for the
journeying, and the heavy feel of the wagons like ships foundering with
goods, with water in the wooden kegs to tilt and slop across the prairies,
and the chickens hysterical in their slung-beneath-the-wagon crates, and the
dogs running out to the wilderness ahead and, fearful, running back with a
look of empty space in their eyes? Is this, then, how it was so long ago?
On the rim of the precipice, on the edge of the cliff of stars. In their
time the smell of buffalo, and in our time the smell of the Rocket. Is this,
then, how it was?"

This is from Writerjack