quotations about autumn
After a summer of heat and humidity that sapped the will and stifled activity, the world feels ready to be lived in again. The morning sky is a featureless dome of pastel blue when it isn't filled by fluffy white cumulous clouds. The air feels crisp, smells clean, and makes me feel alive. Yes, there's a strong undercurrent of nostalgia -- but the best kind. Time collides with recollection on the wake of a passing cold front, stirring echoes of past autumns.
T. SIMMONS
"Weather or not, autumn is coming", Panama City News Herald, September 24, 2015
The fag end of October. Dark evenings. My smelly old Barbour. Chopping and splitting wood. Uncanny stillnesses. Psychedelic maple trees. The thin winter piping of robins. Sodden leaves clinging to the soles of my boots. And Liberty Caps dotting the pastures.
JEREMY CLARKE
"Autumn is the season of magic mushrooms and psychedelic maple trees", The Spectator, October 28, 2015
Autumn is a hint from God to Old Age.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters on Cezanne
Fall doesn't have to aspire to be anything other than what it is. No other season is so temporarily, extraordinarily fun to look at, so invitingly loud to walk through, so recognizable to smell, than fall.... Every deciduous tree has the chance to be best-dressed at the harvest festival, the last dance before the shortest days, the softest sunshine, the longest nights, the most intense shadows of the year. Behold autumn, your eyes are reborn. What a finish.
GEORGE HESSELBERG
"Autumn is a vision of glory from start to finish", Wisconsin State Journal, September 19, 2015
Autumn is a bittersweet time, a reminder that in life there is death and in death life.
MARCIA BONTA
Appalachian Autumn
Autumn, for all her show of stormy woods, is apt to be the accomplice of daily human things that lack dignity, and are, in the now accepted sense of a once noble word, comfortable. Besides, her show of stormy forests is done with an abandonment to the pathos of the moment, with dashings and underlinings--we all know the sort of letter, for instance, which answers to the message and proclamation of Autumn, as she usually is in the outer world. A complete sentimentalist is she, whether in the open country or when she looks in at the lighted windows, and goodnaturedly makes her voice like a very goblin's outside.
ALICE MEYNELL
"Dry Autumn"
The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
A moral is attached to autumnal scenes: leaves falling like our years, flowers fading like our hours, clouds fleeting like our illusions, light diminishing like our intelligence, and the sun growing colder like our affections.
CHATEAUBRIAND
attributed, Day's Collacon
You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A Moveable Feast
Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.
LAUREN DESTEFANO
Wither
Autumn wins you best by this, its mute
Appeal to sympathy for its decay.
ROBERT BROWNING
Paracelsus
Autumn is key planting time for shrubs and trees. It gives them enough sun and warmth to get established before the frosts of winter.
JO MCCAROLL
"How to shape up your garden for autumn", Paul Henry, March 24, 2016
What an abundant harvest has been collected in autumn! The earth has now fulfilled its design for this year, and is going to repose for a short time. Thus nature is continually employed during the greatest part of the year: even in her rest she is active: and in silence prepares a new creation.
CHRISTOPH CHRISTIAN STURM
Reflections on the Works of God in Nature and Providence
Time remorselessly rambles down the corridors and streets of our lives. but it is not until autumn that most of us become aware that our tickets are stamped with a terminal destination.
JOE L. WHEELER
Remote Controlled
I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.
LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY
Anne of Green Gables
'Tis past! no more the summer blooms!
Ascending in the rear,
Behold congenial autumn comes,
The Sabbath of the year!
What time thy holy whispers breathe,
The pensive evening shade beneath,
And twilight consecrates the floods;
While Nature strips her garment gay,
And wears the vesture of decay,
O let me wander through the sounding woods.
JOHN LOGAN
"Ode Written in a Visit to the Country in Autumn"
I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow leopard waiting to pounce.
D. H. LAWRENCE
letter to John Middleton Murry, Oct. 3, 1924
For the apparent disappearance of many plants and animals, autumn is often seen as an end. But the seasons are part of a continuum, a revolving process of birth, death, and renewal -- and if such could be said to have any beginning or end, then fall could just as well be viewed as a beginning. Like the counterweight on a flywheel, autumn provides the inertia to turn the annual cycle over.
PETER J. MARCHAND
Autumn: A Season of Change
What visionary tints the year puts on,
When falling leaves falter through motionless air
Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone!
How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,
As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills
The bowl between me and those distant hills,
And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"An Indian-Summer Reverie"