Hiking with Ray: The Martian Chronicles

"Kind of alone out here aren't you pop?"
"I made up my mind when I came here I wouldn't expect nothing, nor ask nothing, or be surprised by nothing....I get a kick out of the different flower, the different rain. I came to Mars to retire and I wanted to retire in a place where everything is different. An old man needs to have things different. Young people don't want to talk to him, other old people bore hell out of him. So I thought the best place for me is a place so different that all you got to do is open your eyes and your entertained. I got this gas station. If business picks up too much, I'll move on back to some other old highway that's not so busy, where I can earn just enough to live on and still have enough time to feel the different things here."

"Sometimes I feel I'm here all by myself, no one else on the whole damn planet. I'd take bets on it. Sometimes I feel about eight years old. My body squeezed up and everything else tall......You know what Mars is? It's like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago--don't know if you ever had one--they called them kaleidoscopes, bit of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to sunlight and looking in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that's Mars. Don't ask it to be nothing else but what it is."