Night, which in autumn seems to fall from the sky so suddenly, chilled us. —Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, The Crimson Curtain
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
October’s poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter. —Nova Bair
The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn . . . spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end . . . earth scents and the sky winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul. —Monica Baldwin, I Leap over the Wall
The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools. —Henry Beston, Northern Farm
Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon? —Hal Borland
For the fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year’s end. —Hal Borland
Autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day. —Elizabeth Bowen
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. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. —Samuel Butler
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. —Albert Camus
You ought to know that October is the first spring month. —Karel Capek
In my young days I never tasted sorrow. I wanted to become a famous poet. I wanted to get ahead so I pretended to be sad. Now I am old and have known the depths of every sorrow, and I am content to loaf and enjoy the clear autumn. —Hsin Ch’i Chi
The Indian summer . . . the dead summer’s soul. —Mary Clemmer, Presence
The magic of autumn has seized the countryside; now that the sun isn’t ripening anything, it shines for the sake of the golden age; for the sake of Eden; to please the moon for all I know. —Elizabeth Coatsworth, Personal Geography: Almost and Autobiography
Listen . . . With faint dry sound, like steps of passing ghosts, the leaves, frost-crisp’d, break free from the trees and fall. —Adelaide Crapsey
When the bold branches
Bid farewell to rainbow leaves—
Welcome wool sweaters.
—B. Cybrill
Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? —Annie Dillard
The wind-blown leaves turn, dancing the golden sunlight across the tired floor. —Matt Dimmic
It was one of those perfect New York October afternoons, when the explosion of oranges and yellows against the bright blue sky makes you feel like your life is passing through your fingers. —Sarah Dunn, Secrets to Happiness: A Novel
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird, I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. —George Eliot
Let autumn be ended appropriately with a snowstorm, with a vague moving whiteness turning gray and night approaches, with snow settling down or streaking or swirling in aerial eddies. —Paul Errington
Vari-colored leaves waft
At wind’s gentle prodding—
Autumn rites recur.
—Victor Gendrano
I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air. —Nathaniel Hawthorne
The hazy, cloudless skies of Indian summer.
Leaves scurrying down the street before the wind.
The cold shiver from an arctic blast.
Indian Summer. The last warmth of the sun.
Chilly mornings and glorious warm afternoons.
The harvest moon. The hunter’s moon. The rainy season.
Dry corn stalks clattering in the wind. The touch of frost on grass and window pane.
The smell of burning leaves.
—Keith C. Heidorn
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. —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter. —Carol Bishop Hipps
The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many. —Oliver Wendell Holmes
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—November!
—Thomas Hood, No!
I saw old autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence.
—Thomas Hood
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. —P. D. James
Spring flowers are long since gone. Summer’s bloom hangs limp on every terrace. The gardener’s feet drag a bit on the dusty path and the hinge in his back is full of creaks. —Louise Seymour Jones
In the garden, autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil. And at no season, safe perhaps in daffodil time, do we get such superb color effects as from August to November. —Rose G. Kingsley, The Autumn Garden, 1905
The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colors. 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
Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn. —Elizabeth Lawrence
Any night now frost may blacken the last crotalarias, zinnias, marigolds, and chrysanthemums. But, when the dead branches have been cleared away, there will still be the green of the ivy, the grey of santolina, and the scarlet fruit of the firethorn. —Elizabeth Lawrence
The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on . . . a tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind. —Aldo Leopold
A tangerine and russet cascade
Of kaleidoscopic leaves
Creates a tapestry of autumn magic
Upon the emerald carpet of fading summer.
—Judith A. Lindberg
Behold congenial autumn comes, the Sabbath of the Year. —John Logan
Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its autumn. —Thomas Macaulay
Deep inside, we’re still the boys of autumn, that magic time of the year that once swept us onto America’s fields. —Archie Manning
The autumn breeze rises on the shore at Fukiage—and those white chrysanthemums are they flowers? or not? or only breakers on the beach? —Sugawara Michizane
The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of autumn. —John Muir
. . . for those whose favorite season is autumn with its days of cloudless sky, of spacious and clear, far-flung panoramas—those who view nature with detachment, for whom nature’s appeal is primarily pictorial, classicists as opposed to romanticists, perhaps. On such a day, one is usually excited, physically exhilarated, mentally stimulated. Only not much is left for the imagination. —Charlton Ogburn, Jr.
It was Indian summer, a bluebird sort of day as we call it in the north, warm and sunny, without a breath of wind; the water was sky-blue, the shores a bank of solid gold. —Sigurd Olson
The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the moon that looks down upon the resorts of summer time. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night. —Donald Culross Peattie
She calls it stick season, this slow disrobing of summer, leaf by leaf, till the bores of tall trees rattle and scrape in the wind. —Eric Pinder
. . . 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
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
I sit quietly, listening to the falling leaves—
A lonely hut, a life of renunciation.
The past has faded, things are no longer remembered,
My sleeve is wet with tears.
—Ryokan
Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands,
come off the whisper of the silk hangers,
the lap of the flat spear leaves.
—Carl Sandburg
There is a harmony in autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
which through the summer is not heard or seen,
as if it could not be, as if it had not been!
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
A few days ago I walked along the edge of the lake and was treated to the crunch and rustle of leaves with each step I made. The acoustics of this season are different and all sounds, no matter how hushed, are as crisp as autumn air. —Eric Sloane
After the leaves have fallen, we return to a plain sense of things. It is as if we had come to an end of the imagination. —Wallace Stevens
You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without meaning. —Wallace Stevens
For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad. —Edwin Way Teale
Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change. —Edwin Way Teale
I see, when I bend close, how each leaflet of a climbing rose is bordered with frost, the autumn counterpart of the dewdrops of summer dawns. The feathery leaves of yarrow are thick with silver rime and dry thistle heads rise like goblets plated with silver catching the sun. —Edwin Way Teale
Thy bounty shines in autumn unconfined and spreads a common feast for all that live. —James Thomson
Oh how we love pumpkin season. You did know this gourd-ish squash has its own season, right? Winter, Spring, Summer, Pumpkin . . . we anxiously anticipate it every year. —Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer, October 2010
Summer is already better, but the best is autumn. It is mature, reasonable and serious, it glows moderately and not frivolously . . . It cools down, clears up, makes you reasonable. —Valentin
I love the fall. I love it because of the smells that you speak of; and also because things are dying, things that you don’t have to take care of anymore, and the grass stops growing. —Mark Van Doren
The season for enjoying the fullness of life—partaking of the harvest, sharing the harvest with others, and reinvesting and saving portions of the harvest for yet another season of growth. —Denis Waitley
It is only her in large portions of Canada that wonderous second wind, the Indian summer, attains its amplitude and heavenly perfection. . . the temperatures; the sunny haze; the mellow, rich delicate, almost flavored air: Enough to live—enough to merely be. —Walt Whitman, Diary in Canada
Autumn begins with a subtle change in the light, with skies a deeper blue, and nights that become suddenly clear and chilled. The season comes full with the first frost, the disappearance of migrant birds, and the harvesting of the season’s last crops. —Glenn Wolff and Jerry Dennis
Then summer fades and passes and October comes. We’ll smell smoke then, and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure. —Thomas Wolfe
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. —Andrew Wyeth
Autumn is a season followed immediately by looking forward to spring. —Author Unknown