Autumn Quotes - Page 21

• Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

  Clive Barker

  Summer, Dream, Spring

  Clive Barker (1991). “The Hellbound Heart”, Voyager

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• what if a much of a which of a wind
  gives the truth to summer's lie;
  bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
  and yanks immortal stars awry?

  e. e. cummings

  Summer, Stars, Lying

  e. e. cummings (2014). “100 Selected Poems”, p.75, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• But then to part! to part when Time Has wreathed his tireless wing with flowers, And spread the richness of a clime Of fairy o'er this land of ours; When glistening leaves and shaded streams In the soft light of Autumn lay, And, like the music of our dreams, The viewless breezes seemed to stray 'T was bitter then to rend the heart With the sad thought that we must part; And, like some low and mournful spell, To whisper but one word farewell!

  Benjamin

  Dream, Flower, Farewell

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• This is wine," Ghoolion said solemnly. "Wine is drinkable sunlight. It's the most glorious summer's day imaginable, captured in a bottle. Wine can be a melody in a cut-glass goblet, but it can also be a cacophony in a dirty tumbler, or a rainy autumn night, or a funeral march that scorches your tongue.

  Walter Moers

  Summer, Dirty, Wine

  Walter Moers (2009). “The Alchemaster's Apprentice: A Novel”, p.104, The Overlook Press

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• Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

  Mark Twain

  Spiritual, Wall, Book

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• Let whoever wants to, relax in the south, And bask in the garden of paradise. Here is the essence of north—and it's autumn I've chosen as this year's friend.

  Anna Akhmatova

  Garden, Years, Essence

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• I love Toronto's long autumns, warm with windy swirls of golden spores, redolent with giant, sun-roasted leaves flapping up and down the streets, and horrible winter always seeming far, far off!

  Guy Maddin

  Winter, Long, Giants

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• When on the breath of Autumn's breeze, From pastures dry and brown, Goes floating, like an idle thought, The fair, white thistle-down; O, then what joy to walk at will, Upon the golden harvest-hill!

  Mary Howitt

  White, Joy, Floating

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• Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!

  Matthew Arnold

  Boys, Play, Yellow

  'Rugby Chapel, November 1857'

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• All perfect things are saddening in effect. The autumn wood robed in its scarlet clothes, The matchless tinting on the royal rose Whose velvet leaf by no least flaw is flecked. Love's supreme moment, when the soul unchecked Soars high as heaven, and its best rapture knows, These hold a deeper pathos than our woes, Since they leave nothing better to expect.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Clothes, Perfection, Rose

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2012). “Leafs On An Idle Breeze - My Inspirational Poems (Annotated Edition)”, p.658, Jazzybee Verlag

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• September has come, it is hers Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Whose nature prefers Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace. So I give her this month and the next Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already So many of its days intolerable or perplexed But so many more so happy. Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls Dancing over and over with her shadow Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls And all of London littered with remembered kisses.

  Louis MacNeice

  Wall, Kissing, Fire

  Louis MacNeice (2015). “Autumn Journal”, p.14, Faber & Faber

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• What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Summer, Fall, Blow

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.110

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• Through the dripping weeks that follow One another slow, and soak Summer's extinguished fire and autumn's drifting smoke.

  Alfred Austin

  Summer, Fire, Week

  Alfred Austin (1896). “Days of the Year: A Poetic Calendar from the Works of A. Austin”

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• Our feelings probably are not less strong at fifty than they were ten or fifteen years before; but they have changed their objects, and dwell on far different prospects. At five-and-thirty a man thinks of what his own existence is; when the maturity of age has grown into its autumn, he is wrapt up in that of others. The loss of wife or child then becomes more deplorable, as being impossible to repair; for no fresh connection can give us back the companion of our earlier years, nor a "new-sprung race" compensate for that, whose career we hoped to see run.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Running, Strong, Children

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1835). “Lodore”, p.45

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• The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Fall, Years, Sorrow

  Walter Savage Landor (1853). “The Works of Walter Savage Landor”, p.318

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• The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Flower, Cutting, Men

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• It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Color, Up North, Driving

  Jeffrey Eugenides (2003). “Middlesex”, p.324, A&C Black

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• Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Reading, Eye, Thinking

  Catherynne M. Valente (2011). “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making”, p.130, Macmillan

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• He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Dream, Fall, Land

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Lord of the Rings: One Volume”, p.42, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Magnificent autumn! He comes not like a pilgrim, clad in russet weeds; not like a hermit, clad in gray; but like a warrior with the stain of blood in his brazen mail.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Weed, Warrior, Blood

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• Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Spring, Self, Sentimental

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, Claire Harman (1994). “The diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner”, Virago Pr

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• And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

  Dylan Thomas

  Fall, Rose, Rainy

  "Poem in October" l. 14 (1946)

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• Now is the autumn of our ennui.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Ennui

  Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Invisible Monsters”, p.76, Random House

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• Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

  Matsuo Basho

  Inspirational, Nature, Healing

  Matsuo Basho (2014). “Basho's Narrow Road: Spring and Autumn Passages”, p.31, Stone Bridge Press, Inc.

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• Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Country, Fall, Thinking

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