It’s Halloween, which means it’s the final day of Horror October Fortnight and the read-along for Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Since I was unable to do Thursday’s Quotables yesterday, I won’t be doing a review. Instead, this wrap-up will be about all the wonderful quotes I came across.
Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did.
This line made me think that somehow the carnival would be let loose from some, possibly evil and most definitely mysterious, book. I’m glad it didn’t, however, since I think that might have ruined libraries for many readers.
Still most comfortable in the library nights, in out of the rain of people.
I love this line not just because it’s about Mr. Halloway’s love of libraries, but because of the beautiful truth of libraries being a place to get away from “the rain of people.”
By the pricking of my thumbs,/ Something wicked this way comes.
I love the cleverness of using a line, spoken by the 2nd Witch, in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” for the title of the book. If you’re curious to know where exactly in the play this line is, it’s Act 4, Scene 1, Page 2, Line 44. The beauty of it was destroyed in the modern text, so please, stick to the original version.
Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But…Nothing? Where do you hit it?
This sums up the entire story, and is exactly why this book is so scary. There are so many more amazing lines throughout the book, but they require a lot of context, and are wonderful more for the choice of highly descriptive words and the modern style in which they’re written than what is being said.
Happy Halloween!
I love that you included these quotes here. I think the writing was pretty impressive… but much of it, for me, got lost in the chaos of the chase. That whole middle section I struggled with. But as you said, that last quote sums it up so nicely. Thanks for participating!