How we cite our quotes: ("Story Name," Paragraph)
Quote #1
Quietly she wished he might one day again spend as much time holding and touching her like a little harp as he did his incredible books. ("Ylla," 10)
Welcome to one of literature's universal themes: a depressing marriage. Maybe this is Bradbury's way of easing us in; after all, a loveless marriage set in a typical 1940s suburb is something that a lot of his readers could probably relate to.
Quote #2
She didn't watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew... ("Ylla," 76)
Since water is associated with life and growth, you could say that dryness is associated with the opposites—death and decay. Although Bradbury starts Ylla's story focusing on her personal sadness, we soon get a larger glimpse of Mars as a sad, dying planet. Gee, it's almost like her sadness is a symbol for Mars.
Quote #3
She was wearing the same perfume he remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in the train accident. ("The Third Expedition," 173)
Two things to say here: (1) Captain John Black only gets to see his parents because they've already died, so it seems like he can only have this happiness because he's first been sad. (2) The Martians are recreating this from his memory—which means his strongest memory of his parents is probably from the day that they died. That's the kind of subtlety on Bradbury's part that really gets you where it counts. (In the tear ducts.)
Quote #4
In the morning the brass band played a mournful dirge. From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes, and along the sun-filled street, weeping, came the grandmas and mothers and sisters and brothers and uncles and fathers, walking to the churchyard, where there were new holes freshly dug and new tombstones installed. ("The Third Expedition," 219)
Okay, it is so weird that the Martians hold an Earth-style funeral here. It's almost as through they've pretended to be human so convincingly that they feel a little sad about losing their relatives? (And by "losing," we mean "murdering.")
Quote #5
"My God, there were bodies there. It was like walking in a pile of autumn leaves. Like sticks and pieces of burnt newspaper, that's all." ("—And the Moon Be Still as Bright," 21)
The large-scale death on Mars clearly moves some of the humans here, like Hathaway. Chillingly, you can probably connect this horror-show scene with reports of mass killings in the Nazi concentration camps—still a fresh memory when The Martian Chronicles was written.
Quote #6
"We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things." ("—And the Moon Be Still as Bright," 77)
Looks like we've got another pessimist on our hands. This is still the beginning of this story, so people haven't done anything bad yet (except—oops—accidentally killing all the Martians with chickenpox). Spender is simply anticipating the destruction humans will cause. But from his perspective, he's just being a realist.
Quote #7
Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect, nevertheless. ("Night Meeting," 12)
How can something be both perfect and in ruins? Can the very fact that something is in ruins make it perfect? In other words, is Tomás Gomez enjoying the sadness of these ruins? (That's not a totally crazy idea: in the 19th century, a lot of people really enjoyed touring old ruins. Hey, people still do today.)
Quote #8
How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away! ("Usher II," 97)
Notice how Stendahl turns Pikes's loss into an almost physical act of violence—the censors pulled the film out of his camera like pulling guts out of his body. Of course, that's basically what Stendahl plans to do to them.
Quote #9
He lay on the stones, melted wax cooling, his face all faces, one eye blue, the other golden, hair that was brown, red, yellow, black, one eyebrow thick, one thin, one hand large, one small. ("The Martian," 210)
The shapeshifting Martian is all things to all people. Bradbury pulls a pretty good trick on us throughout most of "The Martian": he makes us feel sad for the LaFarges by telling the story from Mr. LaFarge's point of view. But look at this ending: it's true that the LaFarges lost their son (again), but the Spauldings lost their daughter again too. Everyone in the crowd lost something—including the Martian. (You know, his life.) Maybe we should feel most sorry for him.
Quote #10
The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down. ("There Will Come Soft Rains," 11)
The suddenness of the deaths on Earth kind of reminds us here of the suddenness of death on Mars. Two worlds have been shattered, leaving only ghost-like shadows. But here's something to think about: is it sadder for an entire world to be extinct than for a Martian housewife to be unhappy?