Autumn. Is there any greater season? The smell of cinnamon and pumpkin as you walk into the house after a brisk walk outside. The sound of crunching amber leaves with every step you take. The familiar softness of a flannel or a thickly knit scarf. The poetics of the season: a beautiful, colorful death, making room for a new beginning. These authors eloquently find the exact words to capture the essence of the Fall that we all love so fondly.
1. “I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
2. "And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep / Steady thy laden head across a brook; / Or by a cider-press, with patient look, / Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours."
― John Keats, "To Autumn"
3. “The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. [...] The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
4. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
― Henry David Thoreau
5. “Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
6. “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."
[The Autumnal]”
― John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose
7. “Autumn...the year's last, loveliest smile."
[Indian Summer]”
― William Cullen Bryant
8. “But when Fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”
― Stephen King, Salem's Lot
9. "Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.” ― Jane Austen, Persuasion
10. “That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country
11. “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, The Fellowship of the Ring
12. "Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling; / Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard."
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
13. "Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.”
― Robert Browning
14. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
