She found herself suspended between the day calling her and slumber beckoning — a gossamer midsummer dream so light, so airy, if she sighed too heavily she feared she might break the spell. So she leaned in to whisper just loud enough for her favorite pockets of the city to hear her utter, "Tell me another story." And the city obliged.

In case you've been finding yourself in a search of the right words to capture summer's magic, I've compiled some beautiful literary quotes all about the shortest and brightest season of them all. Hopefully, it helps you slow down to appreciate the days and weeks we have left, before September is on our doorstep.

1. "It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside."

― Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy-Tacy and Tib

2. "In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen."

―Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

3. . "Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August."

—Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

4. "Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine."

―Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

5. "Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil."

―Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

6. "Green was the silence, wet was the light,

the month of June trembled like a butterfly."

―Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

7. "It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him in silence, alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine, with the wind blowing down on them out of the pine woods."

―L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

8. "The morning heat had already soaked through the walls, rising up from the floor like a ghost of summers past."

―Erik Tomblin, Riverside Blues

9. "Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth."

―Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses: The Sea of Fertility, 2

10. "The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing."

―Dan Simmons, Drood

11. "Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me."

—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

12. "Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be."

—Nora Ephron

13. "The summer night is like a perfection of thought."

—Wallace Stevens

14. "Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time."

—John Lubbock

15. "What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness."

—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

16. "A life without love is like a year without summer."

—Swedish Proverb

17. "Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England."

—Archibald Macleish

18. "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. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but 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."

—Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

19. "To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow."

—Audrey Hepburn

20. "To see the summer sky is poetry, though never in a book it lie – true poems flee."

– Emily Dickinson

Zimmermann dress (old, from a few seasons ago, similar style here) // Audrey Leighton Vintage earrings // Shot on location in Montauk last summer

Photography
Allie Provost