It seems quite fitting to honor the season of autumn with literature. After all, I don't think I personally have any other attachment to other seasons that inspire the cracking of a good book as much as I do with fall. Perhaps I miss my days as a student, perhaps I'm always just so moved by how writers, poets and thinkers alike have immortalized one of our shortest, most fleeting and perhaps most vibrant seasons of all. Either way, I wanted to collect some of my favorite literary quotes about autumn today, in hopes it reminds you to stop and appreciate your next walk home, as the leaves crunch underneath your feet and the unexpected chill in the air is a welcome one.
- “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
2. “November — with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes — days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines.” ― L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
3. “Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring." ~ Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's
4. “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
5. “Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow.” ~ Donna Tartt, The Secret History
6. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
7. “It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.” ~ Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
8. “It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.” ~ P.D. James, A Taste for Death
9. “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
10. “I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” ~ L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
11. "Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile." ~ William Cullen Bryant
12. "I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it." ~ Lee Maynard
13. “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
14. “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” ~ Albert Camus
15. “I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks October 10, 1842
16. “His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life.” ~ Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
17. “The house was very quiet, and the fog—we are in November now—pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.” ~ E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
18. "Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit.” ~ George Eliot
19. “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 honey-sweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cezanne
20. "No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face." ~ John Donne, The Autumnal
For all outfit details, please visit the original travel posts from last year here and here.
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” ~ Albert Camus
Beautiful!
While I love my overseas life, I do miss the fall season tremendously. Spokane’s autumn is amazing! Have you had a chance to see it yet? It’s better than Seattle’s–if I do say so myself.
This quote is Santa in his younger years:
“His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life.” ~ Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
What a beautiful blog post Krystal. Your creativity never ceases to amaze me!
Love, Annie