August Quotes

• August, the summer's last messenger of misery, is a hollow actor.

  Henry Rollins

  Summer, Actors, Lasts

  9 Copy quote

• August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

  Sylvia Plath

  Summer, Rain, Fall

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.124, Anchor

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• August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.

  Joseph Wood Krutch

  Summer, Months, Slumber

  Joseph Wood Krutch (1995). “The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch”

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• The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.

  Natalie Babbitt

  Summer, Years, Long

  Natalie Babbitt (2015). “Tuck Everlasting”, p.3, Macmillan

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• the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for.

  Natalie Babbitt

  Summer, Dog, Sorry

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• Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say while some fields will blossom and others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made. And give. Give in any way you can, of whatever you possess. To give is to love. To withhold is to wither. Care less for your harvest than how is shared, and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace.

  Kent Nerburn

  Dream, Children, Heart

  40 Copy quote

• August is ripening grain in the fields blowing hot and sunny, the scent of tree-ripened peaches, of hot buttered sweet corn on the cob. Vivid dahlias fling huge tousled blossoms through gardens and joe-pye-weed dusts the meadow purple.

  Jean Hersey

  Weed, Sweet, Garden

  Jean Hersey (1967). “The Shape of a Year”

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• Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.

  Denise Levertov

  Breathe, Sweetness

  Denise Levertov (1983). “Poems of Denise Levertov, 1960-1967”, p.55, New Directions Publishing

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• When summer gathers up her robes of glory, and like a dream of beauty glides away.

  Sarah Helen Whitman

  Summer, Dream, Glory

  Sarah Helen Whitman (1853). “Poems”, p.60

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• Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer

  Jenny Han

  Summer, Winter, June

  Shannon Messenger, Suzanne Young, Jodi Picoult, Samantha van Leer, Lauren Barnholdt (2013). “Get a Taste of Pulseit!: Free Pulseit eSampler”, p.123, Simon and Schuster

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• In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke their tender limbs.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Summer, Flower, Berries

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.179

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• I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven't said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.

  Tove Jansson

  Beautiful, Summer, Twilight

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• Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.

  Kent Nerburn

  Senior, Children, Fields

  Kent Nerburn (1999). “Letters to My Son: A Father's Wisdom on Manhood, Women, Life and Love”, p.189, New World Library

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• What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.

  Jane Austen

  Summer, Rainy Day, Weather

  "Jane Austen's correspondence and letters".

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• A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.

  Francis of Assisi

  Inspirational, Happiness, Summer

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• Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

  William Shakespeare

  Summer, Misunderstood, Thee

  Sonnet 18

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• When in still air and still in summertime
  A leaf has had enough of this, it seems
  To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage
  Its drifting in detachment down the road.

  Howard Nemerov

  Summer, Air, Mind

  Howard Nemerov (1981). “The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov”, p.440, University of Chicago Press

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• I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn.

  Robert Lowell

  Swimming, Air, Tree

  'Mr Edwards and the Spider' (1950)

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• Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

  Joan Didion

  Believe, People, Community

  Joan Didion (2013). “The White Album”, p.30, Zola Books

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• Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
  Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
  News from the humming city comes to it
  It sound of funeral or of marriage bells.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Summer, Garden, Cities

  Alfred Tennyson Tennyson, Baron, Alfred Lord Tennyson (2014). “Fifty Poems”, p.102, Cambridge University Press

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• The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room.

  Horace Walpole

  Summer, England, Way

  Letter to Cole, 28 May 1774, in 'Letters'

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• From the great trees the locusts cry
  In quavering ecstatic duo-a boy
  Shouts a wild call-a mourning dove
  In the blue distance sobs-the wind
  Wanders by, heavy with odors
  Of corn and wheat and melon vines;
  The trees tremble with delirious joy as the breeze
  Greets them, one by one-now the oak
  Now the great sycamore, now the elm.

  Hamlin Garland

  Summer, Distance, Boys

  Hamlin Garland (1961). “Boy Life on the Prairie”, p.178, U of Nebraska Press

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• The band's never taken a year off. Last August we decided to take one, and three months in I was bored to tears.

  Steven Tyler

  Taken, Years, Bored

  10 Copy quote

• The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Fall, Autumn, Yellow

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• August in sub-Saharan Los Angeles is one of the great and awful tests of one's endurance, sanity and stamina.

  Henry Rollins

  Endurance, Tests, Awful

  6 Copy quote