Quotes about autumn
page 2

“Where are the braves, the faces like autumn fruit,
who stared at the child from the coloured frontispiece?”

A. M. Klein (1909–1972) writer, journalist, lawyer

Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga (1983)

“John Pienaar (BBC reporter): Which do you regret more, singing in the bath when forced to withdraw from the ERM, or talking prematurely of green shoots last autumn?
Norman Lamont: I.. Je ne regrette rien.”

Norman Lamont (1942) British politician

Sheila Gunn, "Chancellor warns Newbury against short-term protest", The Times, 24 April 1993.
At a press conference in support of Julian Davidson, Conservative candidate in the Newbury byelection, on 23 April 1993.

Singing

“I had felt sick before and had been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit…. I started gently to move towards one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be construed as a just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving towards the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the. This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika on flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Feeling, Sense, Heart, Christ

“There should be no general election until 2020. There should be a normal Autumn Statement, held in the normal way at the normal time, and no emergency Budget.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech declaring bid for the Conservative Party leadership http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-mays-tory-leadership-launch-statement-full-text-a7111026.html (30 June 2016)

Way, Time

“It was one of those perfect autumn days so common in stories and so rare in the real world.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 2, “A Beautiful Day” (p. 19)

World, Perfection

“.. Our life is a pilgrim's progress. I once saw a very beautiful picture: it was a landscape at evening. In the distance on the right-hand side a row of hills appeared blue in the evening mist. Above those hills the splendour of the sunset, the grey clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple. The landscape is a plain or heath covered with grass and its yellow leaves, for it was in autumn. Through the landscape a road leads to a high mountain far, far away, on the top of that mountain is a city wherein the setting sun casts a glory. On the road walks a pilgrim, staff in hand. He has been walking for a good long while already and he is very tired. And now he meets a woman, or figure in black, that makes one think of St. Paul's word: As being sorrowful yet always rejoicing. That Angel of God has been placed there to encourage the pilgrims and to answer their questions and the pilgrim asks her: Does the road go uphill then all the way? And the answer is: "Yes to the very end."”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote of Vincent van Gogh, from his 'First Sunday Sermon' http://www.vggallery.com/misc/archives/sermon.htm: 'I Am a Stranger on the Earth..'; 29 October 1876 1870s

Life, God, Beauty, Angels

“Autumn colors remind us we are all one dancing in the wind.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Quote included in list https://www.simonandschuster.com/getliterary/our-favorite-literary-quotes-about-autumn/ "11 of Our Favorite Literary Quotes about Autumn” (23 September 2019).

Color, Dance

“These ruinous days of Autumn. At dusk,
the brightness seeps through the crumbling air,
at dusk the air gathers up the brightness”

Edward Hirsch (1950)

'The Renunciation of Poetry'

“Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

War, Soul, Memory, Dead

“The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.”

Truman Capote book Other Voices, Other Rooms

Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)

World, School, Lovers, Light

“Bricks should be made in Spring or Autumn so that they may dry uniformly.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter III, Sec. 2

Spring

“England, with her climate of more than vernal freshness, and in whose summer skies, and rich autumnal clouds, the observer of Nature may daily watch her endless varieties of effect.... to one brief moment caught [by the artist] from fleeting time..”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from Constable's Introduction of the 1833 edition of English landscape scenery, as cited in Constable's English Landscape Scenery, Andrew Wilton, British Museum Prints and Drawings Series, 1979; as quoted in: 'A brief history of weather in European landscape art', John E. Thornes, in Weather Volume 55, Issue 10 Oct. 2000, p. 368
Constable expressed - in his Introduction to the 1833 edition of English landscape scenery - similar sentiments as contemporary landscape-painter Turner, according to Andrew Wilton
1830s

Nature, Time, Summer

“First she studied her husband's flower arrangement. He had chosen the blossom of a single white wild rose and put a single pearl of water on the green leaf, and set it on red stones. Autumn is coming, he was suggesting with the flower, talking through the flower, do not weep for the time of fall, the time of dying when the earth begins to sleep; enjoy the time of beginning again and experience the glorious cool of the autumn air on this summer evening…soon the tear will vanish and the rose, only the stones will remain — soon you and I will vanish and only the stones will remain.”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Source: Shōgun (1975), Ch. 43

Flowers, Tear, Sleep, Study

“It is on some, but not all, of these misty autumn day-breaks that one may hear the chorus of the quail. The silence is suddenly broken by a dozen contralto voices, no longer able to restrain their praise of the day to come.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“September: The Choral Copse”, p. 53.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "August: The Green Pasture," "September: The Choral Copse," "October: Smoky Gold," and "October: Red Lanterns"

Silence

“Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter VII, Things Become More Serious, Section VIII, p. 130

Men

“In warlike pomp, with banners flowing,
The regiments of autumn stood:
I saw their gold and scarlet glowing
From every hillside, every wood.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

I, st. 1.
The Fall of the Leaves (1874)

“There is at least a punky spark in my heart and it may blaze in this autumn gold, fanned by the King. Some of my grandfathers must have been born on a muirland for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/muirletters/id/12500/rec/1 (perhaps Autumn 1870); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 8: Yosemite, Emerson, and the Sequoias 1870s

Heart

“Little, however, is to be learned in confused, hurried tourist trips, spending only a poor noisy hour in a branded grove with a guide. You should go looking and listening alone on long walks through the wild forests and groves in all the seasons of the year. In the spring the winds are balmy and sweet…. In summer the days go by in almost constant brightness…. In the autumn the sighing of the winds is softer than ever…. Winter comes suddenly, arrayed in storms.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 9: The Sequoia and General Grant National Parks

Spring, Learning, Winter, Summer

“I look at the side of your face as the sunlight comes
Streaming through the window in the autumn sunshine
And all the time going to Coney Island I'm thinking,
Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Coney Island
Song lyrics, Avalon Sunset (1989)

Thinking, Time

“I picked this sprig of heather
Autumn has died you must remember
We shall not see each other ever
I'm waiting and you must remember
Time's perfume is a sprig of heather”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Alcools

J'ai cueilli ce brin de bruyère
L'automne est morte souviens-t'en
Nous ne nous verrons plus sur terre
Odeur du temps brin de bruyère
Et souviens-toi que je t'attends
"L'Adieu" (The Farewell), line 1; translation from Donald Revell (trans.) Alcools (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1995) p. 83.
Alcools (1912)

Time, Waiting

“Yet could I these two days have spent,
While still the autumn sweetly shone,
Ah, me! I might have died content
When I had looked on Carcassonne.”

Gustave Nadaud (1820–1893) songwriter

Stanza 2.
Carcassonne, (c. 1887; with translation by John Reuben Thompson)

“Every time my nose gushed blood, I felt like a little boy who'd wet his pants. I jumped out of the chair, pressed a handkerchief against my face, and hustled toward the nearest bathroom […] How red the blood looked against the whiteness of the porcelain sink, I thought. How vividly imagined that color was, how aesthetically shocking. The other fluids that came out of us were dull in comparison, the palest of squirts. Whitish spittle, milky semen, yellow pee, green-brown mucus. We excreted autumn and winter colors, but running invisibly through our veins, the very stuff that kept us alive, was the crimson of a mad artist—a red as brilliant as fresh paint.”

Paul Auster book Oracle Night

Paul Auster, Oracle Night, New York: Henry Holt and Company, pp. 41-42.
Oracle Night (2003)

Color, Imagination, Boy, Winter

“Perhaps when all the world is bare
And cruel winter holds the land,
The Love that finds no place to hide
Will run and catch my hand. I shall not care to have him then,
I shall be bitter and a-cold —
It grows too late for frolicking
When all the world is old.Then little hiding Love, come forth,
Come forth before the autumn goes,
And let us seek thro' ruined paths
The garden's last red rose.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Love in Autumn"
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)

Love, World, Winter

“He hit the water—impacted really is the word for it—at over six hundred miles an hour, with a report so loud that it made birds fly out of trees up to three miles away. At such a speed water effectively becomes a solid. I don’t believe Mr. Milton penetrated it at all, but just bounced off it about fifteen feet, limbs suddenly very loose, and then lay on top of it, still, like an autumn leaf, spinning gently.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 78

Bird, Tree, Water, Speed

“Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Autumnal Sonnet; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Dead

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech at Newton, Montgomeryshire (4 March 1972), from The Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out (Elliot Right Way Books, 1973), pp. 57-8
1970s

Life, Death, People, World

“Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson,
Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green.
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

The Third of November, 1861. Thirty Poems. Appleton, New York. pp. 112-115. (1864)

Summer

“The great Jewish hoax about millions of God’s Chosen People whom the Germans supposedly exterminated seems to have been devised late in 1942, when it was claimed that in the autumn of that year the Germans had murdered two millions of the Holy Race in various ways. By 1943, the number had been increased to six million, and to keep up the progression, it was later increased to 40,000,000, which was seen to be so preposterous that it was reduced to 12,000,000, and at the end of the Crusade to Save the Soviet, the figure of six million was taken as the largest that could impose on the gullible goyim.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"Revised Historiography", Liberty Bell magazine (April 1980)
1970s, 1980s

God, People, Way

“Does [the Minister] not find it extraordinary that the High Court is giving every benefit to a major corporation over the small people of Mayo? Is it not incredible that a full hearing of the issues of concern to the people of Mayo will be heard in the autumn, probably in October? In the meantime, the company is allowed to proceed and put everything in place with the like-minded reminder from the High Court that the pipes will have to be taken out again if the decision goes against Shell…Why is Shell so bullish and confident that it will get its pipeline come what may? Has it been secretly assured by the Minister, his predecessor, the Government or Fianna Fáil that it will get its gas in the way it wants regardless of the genuine fears and concerns of decent local people? Has the Government not fallen over itself on every occasion to facilitate this company?”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

Joe Higgins to Noel Dempsey in July 2005. Western People http://www.westernpeople.ie/news/cwgbkfgbgb/

People, Fear, Way, Confidence

“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

“Already into the last week of October! The dying fall holds only loneliness. In the garden the chrysanthemums bloom, beautiful, peaceful, as they did a year ago, but the autumn leaves, falling one by one, only make me sad.”

Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) Korean Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

Diary entry (October 1974), as quoted in The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Revised and Updated http://books.google.com/books?id=yJZKpYXh2SAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Two+Koreas:+A+Contemporary+History+revised+updated&hl=en&sa=X&ei=X-xvU5TRFPOisQSa34CIBA&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=already%20into%20the%20last%20week&f=false (2001), by Don Oberdorfer, p. 55. 1970s

Sadness, Peace, Beauty, Loneliness

“Aye, ye were blest with folly. Who may tell
What strange conceits upon the earth were sown
And gender'd by the fond garrulity
Of your aereal music? Scatter'd notes,
Half heard, half fancied by the erring sense
Of man, on which they fell like downy seeds
Sown by autumnal winds, grew up, and teem'd
With plenteous madness.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Prometheus
Poems (1851), Prometheus

Music, Sense, Madness

“As autumn's dark storms pour from two echoing hills, toward each other approached the heroes.—As two dark streams from high rocks meet, and mix and roar on the plain; loud, rough and dark in battle met Lochlin and Innis-fail. Chief mixed his strokes with chief, and man with man; steel, clanging, sounded on steel, helmets are cleft on high. Blood bursts and smokes around. … As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high; as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of battle.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

Book I
The Poems of Ossian, Fingal, an ancient Epic Poem

“Some gloomy autumn day, when the dreary north wind is howling, read Ossian to the accompaniment of the weird moans of an Æolian harp hung in the leafless branches of a tree, and you will experience a feeling of intense sadness, an infinite yearning for another state of existence, an intense disgust with the present.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

Par une de ces journées sombres qui attristent la fin de l'année, et que rend encore plus mélancoliques le souffle glacé du vent du Nord, écoutez, en lisant Ossian, la fantastique harmonie d'une harpe éolienne balancée au sommet d'un arbre dépouillé de verdure, et vous pourrez éprouver un sentiment profond de tristesse, un désir vague et infini d'une autre existence, un dégoût immense de celle-ci. Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, ch. 39 http://www.hberlioz.com/Writings/HBM39.htm; Eleanor Holmes, Rachel Holmes and Ernest Newman (trans.) Memoirs of Hector Berlioz from 1803 to 1865 (New York: Dover, 1966) pp. 156-7. Criticism

Sadness, Feeling, Tree, Reading

“To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

On the Aegean Sea, in Ch. 2
Zorba the Greek (1946)

Heart, Joy, Sea, Season

“You misunderstood my words when I said that Michelangelo was a stupid artist... Because I have drunk from another source and a new and marvelous thirst burns my lips – how can I still believe in such artists?! I know what you are thinking when you ask me: 'isn't David a superman? This is how I used to feel, this is what I used to think. The majority of the world's great spirits thought it so.... but now a new air has entered my soul, a new song has reached my ears and the whole world appears totally changed – the autumn afternoon has arrived, the long shadows, the clear air, the serene sky –, in a word: Zarathustra has arrived, do you understand??.... It is only with Nietzsche that I can say I have begun a real life.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's letter to Mr. Fritz Gartz, Florence, undated, c. 5 Jan. 1911; from LETTERS BY GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, GEMMA DE CHIRICO AND ALBERTO DE CHIRICO TO FRITZ GARTZ, MILAN-FLORENCE, 1908-1911 http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/559-567Metafisica7_8.pdf, p. 564 1908 - 1920

Life, Stupidity, World, Feeling

“The cold mountain turns dark green.
The autumn stream flows murmuring on.
Leaning on my staff beneath the wicket gate,
In the rushing wind I hear the cry of the aged cicada.”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

"The Cold Mountain"

Age, Mountain, Cry

“And it's certain that unexpected new ideas are beginning to emerge. That paintings are once again beginning to be painted in very different tone from a few years ago.
The last thing I made is a rather large study of an avenue of poplars with the yellow autumn leaves, where the sun makes glittering patches here and there on the fallen leaves on the ground, which are interspersed with the long shadows cast by the trunks. At the end of the road a peasant cottage, and the blue sky above it between the autumn leaves.
I think that in a year's time — having spent that year once again painting a great deal and constantly — I'll change my manner of painting and my colour a great deal, and that I'm likely to become slightly more sombre rather than lighter.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote from Vincent's letter to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, on or about Saturday, 25 October 1884; from original text of letter 467 - vangoghletters online http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let467/letter.html 1880s, 1884

Idea, Thinking, Study, Change

“Autumn! Autumn! The Alexandrine epoch of the year, gathering into its enormous libraries all the sterile wisdom of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the solar cycle! Oh, those aged mornings, as yellow as parchment, sweet with wisdom, like late evenings. Oh, those cunningly smiling mornings, like shrewd palimpsests, many-layered like old, yellowed books. Oh, the autumnal day, that old jester-librarian clambering up ladders in his slipped-down dressing gown, sampling the preserves of all ages and cultures!”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Second Autumn” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/second_autumn.htm His father, The seasons

Wisdom, Books, Age, Smile

“She must have walked through life with men like him falling at her feet, squashing them underfoot like autumn leaves. It probably happened so often that all she noticed was that nice crunching sound.”

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 21 (p. 357)

Life, Men

“It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.”

P. D. James (1920–2014) English crime writer

A Taste for Death Published 1986. Page 373.
Other

Life, Memory, Perfection

“A staggering 50,000 M Devices were shipped to Russia: British aerial attacks using them began on 27 August 1919, targeting the village of Emtsa, 120 miles south of Archangel. Bolshevik soldiers were seen fleeing in panic as the green chemical gas drifted towards them. Those caught in the cloud vomited blood, then collapsed unconscious. The attacks continued throughout September on many Bolshevik-held villages: Chunova, Vikhtova, Pocha, Chorga, Tavoigor and Zapolki. But the weapons proved less effective than Churchill had hoped, partly because of the damp autumn weather. By September, the attacks were halted then stopped. Two weeks later the remaining weapons were dumped in the White Sea. They remain on the seabed to this day in 40 fathoms of water.”

Giles Milton (1966) British writer and historian

Winston Churchill's shocking use of chemical weapons https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons (1 September 2013), The Guardian.

Hope, Water, Weather

“I see them, crowd on crowd they walk the earth,
Dry leafless trees no autumn wind laid bare;
And in their nakedness find cause for mirth,
And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare;
No sap doth through their clattering branches flow,
Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright appear;
Their hearts the living God have ceased to know,
Who gives the springtime to th' expectant year.”

Jones Very (1813–1880) American poet and essayist

From The Dead

God, Spring, Tree, Appearance

“As a schoolboy drawing-lessons became my favorite, and that pleasure was not ignited a little when, by the time of my twelfth year, the cityscape-painter B. J. van Hove became our neighbor. Since then I began to long for the moment that I would be allowed to change the school bench for a place in his studio. That desire was already satisfied in the autumn of [18]31.”

Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891) Dutch painter

origineel citaat van Johannes Bosboom, in Nederlands: Als schoolknaap was de teekenles mij de liefste geworden en die lust werd niet weinig aangewakkerd, toen, omstreeks mijn twaalfde jaar, de stadsgezichtschilder B. J. van Hove onze buurman werd. Sinds dien tijd begon ik sterk te verlangen naar het oogenblik, waarop ik de schoolbank tegen een plaatsje in zijn atelier zou mogen verwisselen. Dat verlangen werd reeds bevredigd in het najaar van [18]31.
Source: 1880's, Een en ander betrekkelijk mijn loopbaan als schilder, p. 7

Pleasure, School, Change, Time

“In the lap of hoary Europe lie her children ill at rest,
Reaching hands of supplication to their brethren of the West;
Pale about the lifeless fountain of their ancient freedom, wait
Till the angel move its waters and avenge their stricken state.
Let me then, a new crusader, to the eastward set my face,
Wake the fires of old tradition on each sacred altar-place,
Till a trodden people rouse them, with a clamor as divine
As the winds of autumn roaring through the clumps of forest-pine.
I myself would seize their banner; they should follow where it led,
To the triumph of the victors or the pallor of the dead.”

Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) American poet, critic, and essayist

"Flood-Tide" (1860).

Children, People, Lie, Angels

“I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned slowly into autumn.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Blood on the Tracks (1975), Idiot Wind

Tree, Waiting

“Autumn to winter, winter into spring,
Spring into summer, summer into fall, —
So rolls the changing year, and so we change;
Motion so swift, we know not that we move.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

"Immutable"

Spring, Winter, Change, Summer

“There is a flower, a snow-white flower,
Fragile as if a morning shower
Would end its being, and the earth
Forget to what it gave a birth;
And it looks innocent and pale,
Slight as the least force could avail
To pluck it from its bed, and yet
Its root in depth and strength is set.
The July sun, the autumn rain,
Beat on its slender stalk in vain;—
Around it spreads, despite of care,
Till the whole garden is its share;
And other plants must fade and fall
Beneath its deep and deadly thrall.
This is love's emblem; it is nurst
In all unconciousness at first,
Too slight, too fair, to wake distrust;
No sign how that an after hour
Will rue and weep its fatal power.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto IV
The Troubadour (1825)

Love, Flowers, Birth, Sun

“In the autumn of 1916 when I devoted all my energies to drawing up systematic guidelines for the liberation of working women in all areas, I found a valuable support in the first President of the Soviets, Sverdlov, now dead. Thus the first Congress of Women Workers and Women Peasants could be called as early as November of 1918; some 1147 delegates were present. Thus the foundation was laid for methodical work in the whole country for the liberation of the women of the working and the peasant classes. A flood of new work was waiting for me. The question now was one of drawing women into the people's kitchens and of educating them to devote their energies to children's homes and day-care centers, the school system, household reforms, and still many other pressing matters. The main thrust of all this activity was to implement, in fact, equal rights for women as a labor unit in the national economy and as a citizen in the political sphere and, of course, with the special proviso: maternity was to be appraised as a social function and therefore protected and provided for by the State.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Women, Children, People, Education

“This is an autumn when they come no more.
Beech leaves yellow and fall, the beech-mast rots
Uneaten. Infertile now the beech
Hollows its heart, begetting naught.
There is frost on the grandson's eyes,
And only rumor upon the skies…”

Donald Davidson (1893–1968) American poet, essayist, critic and author

The Horde

Heart

“There grew ten thousand flowers, on whose leaves
Shone every hue that ever yet hath shone
In a king's diadem of Indian gems,
Or in the tints an autumn sunset throws
O'er the rich glaciers in the rainbow arch
Of the departing shower;”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Flowers

“Come out — pretty Rose-Bud, — my lone, timid one!
Come forth from thy green leaves, and peep at the sun!
For little he does, in these dull autumn hours,
At height'ning of beauty, or laughing with flowers.”

Hannah Flagg Gould (1788–1865) American writer

"The Rose-Bud of Autumn" in The Youth's Coronal (published 1850).

Beauty, Flowers, Sun

“In the Autumn semester, 1955, I taught Principles of Economics, and found it a challenge to convey basic microeconomic theory to students. Why/how could any market approximate a competitive equilibrium? I resolved that on the first day of class the following semester, I would try running a market experiment that would give the students an opportunity to experience an actual market, and me the opportunity to observe one in which I knew, but they did not know what were the alleged driving conditions of supply and demand in that market”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Vernon L. Smith (2002) in: " Vernon L. Smith - Biographical http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/smith-bio.html". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 13 Jun 2014.

“I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Ode. Autmn http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk/eop_hood_poetical_works_5.htm#195b, st. 1 (1827). 1820s

Silence

“It is most sad to watch the fall
Of autumn leaves!--but worst of all
It is to watch the flower of spring
Faded in its fresh blossoming!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Title Poem
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Sadness, Spring, Flowers

“On thy wither’d lips and dry,
Which like barren furrows lie,
Brooding kisses I will pour,
Shall thy youthful heart restore.
(Such kind showers in autumn fall,
And a second spring recall);
Nor from thee will ever part,
Ancient Person of my Heart.”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover, ll. 7-14.
Other

Lie, Youth, Spring, Kiss

“Directly under his feet was the French stronghold, — scattered spires and slated roofs flashing in the rich, autumnal sunlight; the little capital which was just then the subject of so much discussion in Europe, and the goal of so many fantastic dreams.”

Willa Cather book Shadows on the Rock

Shadows on the Rock (1931), Book I, Ch. 1

Dreams

“The truth is the Tree of Life knows no seasons. High up among its branches spring warbles all the year; and they are only the poor pensioners underneath who count the months, and tell an autumn and a winter.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 526.

Life, Truth, Spring, Tree

“Autumn grows old: he, like some simple one,
In Summer's castaway is strangely clad”

William Henry Davies (1871–1940) British poet

Autumn.

Summer

“Next morning, when the golden sunne was risen,
And new had bid good morrow to the mountaines;
When night her silver light had lockt in prison,
Which gave a glimmering on the christall fountaines:
Then ended sleepe, and then my cares began,
Ev'n with the uprising of the silver swan.

Oh, glorious sunne! quoth I, viewing the sunne,
That lightenst everie thing but me alone:
Why is my summer season almost done,
My spring-time past, and ages autumne gone?
My harvest's come, and yet I reapt no corne:
My love is great, and yet I am forlorne.”

Richard Barnfield (1574–1627) English poet

The Second Dayes Lamentation of the Affectionate Shepheard. The Affectionate Shepheard http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19902 (1594)

Love, Age, Mountain, Spring

“He [ Johannes Warnardus Bilders ] painted – was living in Utrecht, [he] immediately attracted attention and had many ideas, got good prices for that time; and once he thought 'Is this really beautiful, as people say - but the people are crazy or I am - I came to the conclusion – the people are wrong - picked up my things and went to Oosterbeek' [Autumn of 1841, where he thoroughly started to study nature: branches, stems, plants. Etc.. ] (translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek).”

Marie Bilders-van Bosse (1837–1900) painter from the Netherlands

version in original Dutch (citaat uit een brief van MarieBilders-van Bosse, in het Nederlands:) Hij schilderde – woonde te Utrecht, [hij] trok aanstonds de aandacht en had veel ideeën, kreeg voor den tijd goede prijzen; en dacht op eenmaal 'Moet dat nu mooi heeten – maar de menschen zijn gek of ik – Ik kwam tot de conclusie – de menschen slaan de bal mis – pakte mijn rommeltje en ging naar ' [herfst van 1841, waar Bilders grondig studie van de natuur begint te maken: takken, stammen, planten. Etc..]
In a letter of Marie Bilders-van Bosse to A. C. Loffelt, c. 1891; as cited in Van Oosterbeek naar Haagsche School, E. Maas; kunsthandel Kupperman, Amsterdam, 1994, p. 57
Marie Bosse-Bilders was first a pupil of the older Bilders; later they married

People, Beauty, Idea, Nature

“The Autumn wood the aster knows,
The empty nest, the wind that grieves,
The sunlight breaking thro' the shade,
The squirrel chattering overhead,
The timid rabbits lighter tread
Among the rustling leaves.”

Dora Read Goodale (1866–1953) U.S. poet

Asters, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 45.

“To paint an autumn landscape I will not try to remember what colors suit this season, I will only be inspired by the sensation that the season gives me; the icy clearness of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the tonalities of the leaves. My sensation itself may vary, the autumn may be soft and warm like a protracted summer or quite cool with a cold sky and lemon yellow trees that give a chilly impression and announce winter.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1900s, Notes d'un Peintre (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 412

Color, Tree, Winter, Summer

“If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), Chapter 38

People, Time, Summer, Personality

“You must have heard that last autumn I almost got married, but I am glad I realized in time that it had been an illusion, all those beautiful things. Although I have always lived for art, I am also attracted to the beautiful in life and so I sometimes do things that seem strange for me.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in an undated letter to Alleta de Jongh, Paris, c. Spring 1912; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 243, note 61
1910's

Life, Beauty, Art, Time

““Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword, a pebble could be a diamond, a tree, a castle. Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, and they parted with leaves in their hair.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

The History of Love (2005)

World, Girl, Game, Boy

“And others came… Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies,
Splendours, and GloOms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp; — the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XIII
Adonais (1821)

Pleasure, Fear, Family, Smile

“The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang — home-going. So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock-ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit — waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at its own heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast — all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. 'Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

pages 439-440 ("Trees towering … into eternity" are the next-to-last lines of the documentary film " John Muir in the New World http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/john-muir-in-the-new-world/watch-the-full-documentary-film/1823/" (American Masters), produced, directed, and written by Catherine Tatge.) John of the Mountains, 1938

Love, Life, Death, Law

“No more the summer of my life remains,
My autumn's lengthening evenings chill my veins;
Down the black stream of years by woes on woes
Winged on, I hasten to the tomb's repose…”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Vão os anos decendo, e já do Estio
Há pouco que passar até o Outono;
A Fortuna me faz o engenho frio,
Do qual já não me jacto nem me abono;
Os desgostos me vão levando ao rio
Do negro esquecimento e eterno sono...
Stanza 9, lines 1–6 (tr. William Julius Mickle)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto X

Life, Summer

“During late Autumn 1956, in connection with a marketing study, I forecast the imminence of a major U. S. economic recession, triggered by the over-stretching of a post-1954 credit-bubble centered in financing of automobiles, housing, and analogous consumer goods. This recession broke out in February 1957 statistics, and was generally, if reluctantly acknowledged to have occurred several months later. The recession-spiral lasted into mid-1958, and was followed by a prolonged stagnation until an upturn appeared under the Kennedy administration.”

Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement

"The Coming Disintegration of Financial Markets" (June 1994) http://spanish.larouchepac.com/static/about-larouche.html.

Study, Appearance, Housing

“When the peace of autumn has become poetic instead of being taken for granted, the last day of the plover become a matter of personal regret, the pony become associated with the history of art and mythology, the evening ice-film on the farm stream become reminiscent of crystal, and the smoke from the chimney become a message to us from those who discovered fire—then the time has come to say goodbye... I had long begun to count the days until I could once again leave home, where I felt an alien, and go out into the alien world, where I was at home. But still I paused for a while over my thoughts of departure, and listened to the silence that had robbed the gods of sleep; and dusk sank slowly over the ponies.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

God, World, Peace, Art

“Then cricket sing thy song, or answer mine
Thine whispers blame, but mine has naught but praises
It matters not. — Behold the autumn goes,
The Shadow grows,
The moments take hold of eternity;
Even while we stop to wrangle or repine
Our lives are gone
Like thinnest mist,
Like yon escaping colour in the tree: —
Rejoice! rejoice! whilst yet the hours exist
Rejoice or mourn, and let the world swing on
Unmoved by Cricket-song of thee or me.”

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873) American poet

"The Cricket" lines 120–131

World, Tree, Singing

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

Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (1835–1905) writer

Cousin Helen's Visit (1935).

Lovers, Cry

“T'was Spring, t'was Summer, all was gay
Now Autumn bears a cloud brow
The flowers of Spring are swept way
And Summer fruits desert the bough”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

from Autumn

Way, Spring, Flowers, Summer

“The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.”

Elinor Wylie book Nets to Catch the Wind

1
Nets to Catch the Wind (1921), Wild Peaches

Winter, Summer, Season

“Autumn was falling, but the pine
Seem'd as it mock'd all change; no sign
Of season on its leaf was seen,
The same dark gloom of changeless green.
But like the gorgeous Persian bands
'Mid the stern race of northern lands,
The chesnut boughs were bright with all
That gilds and mocks the autumn's fall.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto II
The Troubadour (1825)

Change, Season

“Alas! that every lovely thing
Lives only but for withering,—
That spring rainbows and summer shine
End but in autumn's pale decline.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto I
The Troubadour (1825)

Love, Spring, Summer

“You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.”

Adam Zagajewski (1945) Poet

Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Try to Praise the Mutilated World, September 11, 2011, Adam Zagajewski, The New Yorker, September 24, 2001 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/24/010924po_poem_zagajewski,

World, Music, Light, Singing

“Painting is the magic art, the fire set alight on the windows of the rich dwelling, as on those of the humble hovel, from the last rays of the setting sun, it is the long mark, the humid mark, the fluent and still mark that the dying wave etches on the hot sand, it is the darting of the immortal lizard on the rock burnt by the midday heat, it is the rainbow of conciliation, on sad May afternoons, after the storm has passed, down there, making a dark backdrop to the almond trees in flower, to the gardens with their washed colours, to the ploughmen's huts, smiling and tranquil, it is the livid cloud chased by the vehement blowing of Aeolus enraged, it is the nebulous disk of the fleeting moon behind the ripped-open funereal curtain of a disturbed sky in the deep of night, it is the blood of the bull stabbed in the arena, of the warrior fallen in the heat of battle, of Adonis' immaculate thigh wounded by the obstinate boar's curved tusk, it is the sail swollen with the winds of distant seas, it is the centuries-old tree browned in the autumn..”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from the first lines in De Cirico's essay 'Painting', 1938; from http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/211_Painting_1938_Metaphysical_Art.pdf 'Painting', 1938 - G. de Chirico, presentation to the catalogue of his solo exhibition Mostra personale del pittore Giorgio de Chirico, Galleria Rotta, Genoa, May 1938], p. 211
1920s and later

Sadness, Smile, Art, Flowers

“I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 1: Wednesday Afternoon Picnic

World, School, Color, Grass

“From the point of view of our discussion, the book as a response to political and literary circumstances, its origin belongs to the autumn and winter of 1678-80, exactly a decade earlier than it is traditionally supposed to have been written. Two Treatises is an Exclusion Tract, not a Revolution Pamphlet.”

Peter Laslett (1915–2001) English historian

"Introduction," in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Books, Winter

“Autumn nights, it seems,
are long by repute alone:
scarcely had we met
when morning's first light appeared,
leaving everything unsaid.”

Ono no Komachi (825–900) Japanese poet

Source: Helen Craig McCullough's translations, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1985), p. 142

Light, Appearance, Night

“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)

Waiting, Heart, Dead

“In the autumn of 1884 I went to Paris. The spirit that greeted me was certainly more impressive than in Germany. I studied in a famous school. The French who I met there seemed to me not at all equipped. Traditional views. I was there for three years. I never found a talent. Among the Germans, in particular at the Academy of Munich, there was a lot more momentum. I admire the French painting from Watteau to Monet, otherwise there is nothing that can be said to be exceptional.”

Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) German painter

Quote, 1923; in Lovis Corinth, Selbstbiographie, L. Corinth; Hirzel, Leipzig, 1926, p. 190; as quoted in: German Artists' Writings in the XX Century - Lovis Corinth, Autobiographic Writings. Part two http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2014/10/german-artists-writings-in-xx-century.html

School, Study, Painting