“The window opened gently and a still Autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil.”

— Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

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Anthony Burgess 297

English writer 1917–1993

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 28 “Flay Brings a Message” (p. 152)

“Autumn wins you best by this its mute
Appeal to sympathy for its decay.”

Robert Browning Paracelsus

Part 1.
Paracelsus (1835)

“Sad that our finest aspiration
Our freshest dreams and meditations,
In swift succession should decay,
Like Autumn leaves that rot away.”

Aleksandr Pushkin book Eugene Onegin

Что наши лучшие желанья,
Что наши свежие мечтанья
Истлели быстрой чередой,
Как листья осенью гнилой.
Source: Eugene Onegin (1823), Ch. 8, st. 11.

“Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

“A slow autumn rain:
The sad eyes of my mother
Fill a lonely night.”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

Haiku: This Other World (1998)

“We lack but open eye and ear
To find the Orient's marvels here;
The still small voice in autumn's hush,
Yon maple wood the burning bush.”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery

The Chapel of the Hermits; comparable to Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book vii

“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. The heart of the North is dead, and the fingers of cold are corpse fingers.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Letter to John Middleton Murry (3 October 1924)

“The Autumn seems to cry for thee,
Best lover of the Autumn-days!”

Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (1835–1905) writer

Cousin Helen's Visit (1935).

“This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, I Have A Dream (1963)
Context: It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

“Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams
Here lives an idle man
In the daytime wandering over green mountains
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff
Swiftly springs and autumns pass
But my mind is at peace, clear and free
By now I need nothing to lean on
To be still as the waters of the autumn river”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

“The window opened gently and a still Autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil.”

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Anthony Burgess 297

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