Well, he felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet...
Douglas knows the value of seasons because he has experienced them. To him, summer is most enjoyable because he has endured the long winter preceding it. He understands that seasonality is important to fully appreciate each and every experience because they build off of one another. You can love the warmth and sun of summer only if you've survived the harsh cold of winter before.
Douglas sprawled back on the dry porch planks, completely contented and reassured by these voices, which would speak on through eternity, flow in a stream of murmurings over his body, over his eyelids, into his drowsy ears, for all time.
For Douglas, his nostalgia often comes in the form of routine. He loves ritual. While he writes down many of his experiences to memorialize them, he doesn't do this with every one. As he lays on his back, he is soaking in the full sensory experience of the moment. He realizes that his memory is his own personal way of preserving an experience for all time. This is paralleled in the memories of Helen Loomis and Colonel Freeleigh, who lived fully and richly and internalized those experiences to be able to one day share them with others.
The reason why grownups and kids fight is because they belong to separate races. Look at them, different from us. Look at us, different from them. Separate races, and never the twain shall meet.
Tom concludes that adults and children are distinct from one another. One isn't formed from the other; they're separate beings. What he means is that adults and kids have no concept of what it feels like to be the other. Adults seem to have completely forgotten their childhood experiences, so they view life differently. However, Bradbury skillfully and sympathetically gives readers insights into the minds of both children and adults, finding value in all stages of life.
I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I'll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade.
Douglas's great-grandma is making a point her about heritage. While she is physically dying, she believes that her legacy will live forever in the lives of her children and their children and so on for generations. She says they will live lives much like hers; it is like nothing ever changes except the faces of the people doing the living. Another aspect of this quote is that family is perhaps the most important thing there is. Family is what sustains us, gives us support and love and a meaningful life. The connections we have with siblings, parents, grandparents, and more shape who we are. Great-grandma may be dying but because she lived and loved with her family, she will not be forgotten.
I'm alive, he thought.
This is the big moment for young Douglas Spaulding: out in the middle of the fragrant, fecund woods he has a realization that he is alive and that it is miraculous. This is a rite of passage, an initiation. It is Douglas's first step to adulthood because he will have to reconcile this knowledge with the knowledge that he attains later - being alive means that one day you will die. Bradbury imbues this scene with several archetypal aspects. Douglas is in the forest, a traditionally powerful and mysterious place where transformations occur and one seems poised between two worlds. Bradbury personifies the epiphany that is coming towards Douglas, almost giving it a religious air. Douglas is with his father, who has presumably undergone this very experience in his own youth.
... towns never really won they merely existed in calm peril...
Through the ravine, which divides Green Town and functions as a frightening yet beguiling place, Bradbury ruminates on man vs. nature. He articulates the reality that most towns are also on the edge of something like the ravine and even though man tries his best to control and cultivate nature for his own ends, nature will ultimately triumph even if it takes a long time to do so. The ravine possesses a sort of primitive power and darkness and poses a threat to the townspeople in its ability to lure them within, obfuscate its dangers, and fragment the town. Bradbury also explores these themes in The Martin Chronicles, in which man's attempts to subdue and colonize the red planet rarely succeed.
And he watched with now-gentle sorrow and now-quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance as all the bits and pieces of this house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily again.
Leo's story is a bittersweet one, for while his impetus to design a Happiness Machine is perhaps well-intentioned and noble, it ends up completely backfiring. He also reveals the limitations of adults in discerning where true happiness lies, which parallels Tom's observation that adults can be afraid and alone and don't have all the answers. Leo had failed to see that happiness was in his very home rather than in dreams of far-off places or visions of youth and beauty. Thankfully Leo realizes this rather than spending his life searching for it; this is the lesson Bradbury stresses to his reader, then - one must be grateful for the family and friends and life one has rather than seek to augment it with lies.
"It's the way God runs the world."
Tom thought about this for a moment.
"He's all right, Doug," said Tom. "He tries."
Douglas and Tom are only 12 and 10, respectively, but they're already grappling with big questions. They face change and loss and stark realizations that they too are fundamentally alone and one day must die. Here Douglas is essentially begging his brother to be a constant, to never leave him, to defy the notion that everything good and comfortable must fade. He questions God, seeing that God must be sanctioning these losses. Tom also questions God but gives him more credit. Overall, these sweet, smart, and kind children are doing what we all must do in figuring what we believe, what matters, and what the meaning of life is.
Lavinia stood with three people looking at her, staring at her. She felt nothing. Except, perhaps, the slightest prickle of excitement in her throat.
This quote reveals that Lavinia isn't terrified of the man asking after her as much as her friends are. There is a part of her that thrills to the danger, that feels excited that she is desired. She is (most likely) a virgin and says outright that she wants to have as much fun as an unmarried woman can. She wants to push the envelope, to feel alive by playing with fire.
"I don't want to die! Douglas screamed, without a sound. You'll have to anyway, said the voice, you'll have to anyway...
In this profoundly moving and disturbing scene, Douglas confronts the full horror of what he now knows and realizes that, at least right now, he can barely handle it. He stares into the abyss and cannot look away; he lets what he knows will happen to him and everyone he loves fully sink in. It is not surprising that the psychological toll this takes is heavy and that he almost perishes. Douglas lives, however, and it is an admirable quality of his that he seeks the answers to life's big questions, and that even though he suffers and knows the end of the story he ultimately wishes to live a full and meaningful life.
