The Martian Chronicles

He felt the baked hills simmering down into frosty night, and he thought of the rich, inky soil, a soil so black and shiny it almost crawled and stirred in your fist, a rank soil from which might sprout gigantic beanstalks from which, with bone-shaking concussion, might drop screaming giants.

Space was an anesthetic; seventy million miles of space numbed you, put memory to sleep

If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.

but how are we to give up the very thing we’ve wanted, no matter if it stays only a day and is gone, making the emptiness emptier, the dark nights darker, the rainy nights wetter?

Don’t interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it’s not polite.

in a death that was not even a death, for there had never been a life.

“I’ll let you burn her personally.”

and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!)

But after everything was pinned down and neat and in its place, when everything was safe and certain, when the towns were well enough fixed and the loneliness was at a minimum, then the sophisticates came in from Earth.

And the rockets struck at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old towns