Quotes about summer
page 8

“Magazines were even more scarce than books. It was after I moved into "town" (speaking comparatively) that I began to buy magazines. I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old; I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I'll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it never had occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an Adventure. I still have the copy. After that I bought Adventure for many years, though at times it cramped my resources to pay the price. It came out three times a month, then… I skimped and saved from one magazine to the next; I'd buy one copy and have it charged, and when the next issue was out, I'd pay for the one which I owed, and have the other one charged, and so on. So I generally owed for one, but only one.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to H. P. Lovecraft (1933)
Letters

Books, Time, Reading, Night

“The reasons for censorship reflect the social climate of the times. The publisher of Debutante Hill asked me to revise the manuscript because I had a 19-year-old boy (the ‘bad guy’) drink a beer. When I changed the beer to a Coke, the book was published and won the ‘Seventeenth Summer Literary Award.”

Lois Duncan (1934–2016) American young-adult and children's writer

On censorship, interview https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20130801124618/http://absolutewrite.com/specialty_writing/lois_duncan.htm in Absolute Write (2002) 1990–2002

Books, Guy, Boy, Drink

“After all the words are said,
after all the dreams we made;
every one a precious one,
every one a summer sun…”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Dreams, Sun

“Summer was gone and now Indian summer. The grass was cold and there was no mist and no dew. After he left she would go in and light the gas and close the shatters, and he would go down the path and on to the village. To these two life had come quickly and gone, leaving not bitterness, but pity; not disillusion, but only pain.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

"The Lees of Happiness"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Life, Pain, Light, Grass

“In retrospect, Mooney’s mission looks incredibly naive. It is astonishing that he could have been so close to affairs in Germany and yet not have realised the true nature of the Nazi regime; but it seems this was so. His efforts, though made in good faith, were kept secret at first, but eventually news leaked out and in the summer of 1940 PM magazine in the USA ran a series of articles accusing Mooney of Nazi sympathies and linking his meeting with Hitler to his earlier receipt of the German Order of Merit for services to industry in 1938.”

Morgen Witzel (1960) Canadian historian, business theorist

Source: Fifty key figures in management, 2004, p. 196

Secret, Faith, Nature, Effort

“I have been living a hermit-life, though always with my pencil in my hand... How much real delight have I had with the study of landscape this summer! Either I am myself improved in the art of seeing nature, which Sir Joshua call painting, or nature has unveiled her beauties to me less fastidiously. Perhaps there is something of both, so we will divide the compliment.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from Constable's letter to Rev. John Fisher (22 July 1812), as quoted in Richard Friedenthal, Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock (Thames and Hudson, London, 1963), p. 40
1800s - 1810s

Life, Beauty, Art, Nature

“Past are three summers since she first beheld
The ocean; all around the child await
Some exclamation of amazement here.
She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,
Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?
That wondrous soul Charoba once possest,—
Capacious, then, as earth or heaven could hold,
Soul discontented with capacity,—
Is gone (I fear) forever. Need I say
She was enchanted by the wicked spells
Of Gebir, whom with lust of power inflamed
The western winds have landed on our coast?
I since have watcht her in lone retreat,
Have heard her sigh and soften out the name.”

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) British writer

Gebir, Book I (1798). It is reported that "these lines were specially singled out for admiration by Shelley, Humphrey Davy, Scott, and many remarkable men"; Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), citing Forster, Life of Landor, vol. i. p. 95.

Fear, Soul, Past

“At a certain age children are greatly intrigued by the possibility of locating themselves on a map. It appears strange that one's familiar life should actually have all occurred in an area delineated by a set of quite impersonal (and hitherto unfamiliar) coordinates on the surface of the map. The child's exclamations of "I was there" and "I am here right now" betray the astonishment that the place of last summer's vacation, a place marked in memory by such sharply personal events as the ownership of one's first dog or the secret assembling of a collection of worms, should have specific latitudes and longitudes devised by strangers to one's dog, one's worms, and oneself. This locating of oneself in configurations conceived by strangers is one of the important aspects of what, perhaps euphemistically, is called "growing up". One participates in the real world of grown-ups by having an address. The child who only recently might have mailed a letter addressed "To my Granddaddy" now informs a fellow worm-collector of his exact address – street, town, state and all – and finds his tentative allegiance to the grown-up world view dramatically legitimated by the arrival of the letter.”

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) Austrian-born American sociologist

Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), p. 81

Life, Children, Secret, Age

“That summer I was nominated to go to the Team Birkie ski camp for the best high school cross-country skiers in the state. … The camp served vegetable lasagna, all kinds of salads, and freshly baked whole wheat bread. … I didn't have any choice, so I ate it all. And I couldn't believe how good it tasted! What was even more amazing was how great I felt. I trained more, and more often, at that camp than I ever had before. And I had never felt better, stronger. I suspected that what I was eating had something to do with how I was feeling, but it wasn't until years later, when I began to study the connection between diet and exercise, nutrition and health, that I learned the importance of diet for everyone — not just athletes. I would learn that a plant-based diet meant more fiber, which sped food through the digestive tract, minimizing the impact of toxins. The same diet also meant more vitamins and minerals; more substances like lycopene, lutein, and beta carotene, which helps protect against chronic disease. And it would mean less refined carbohydrates and trans fats, both implicated in heart disease and other ailments.”

Scott Jurek (1973) American ultramarthon runner

Source: Eat and Run (2012), Ch. 4, pp. 31-32

Health, Disease, School, Food

“In my eyes, the year 1942 already has behind it the most fateful trial of our people. That was the winter of '41 to '42. I may be permitted to say that in that winter the German people, and in particular its Wehrmacht, were weighed in the balance by Providence. Nothing worse can or will happen. That we conquered that winter, that "General Winter," that at last the German fronts stood, and that this spring, that is, early this summer, we were able to proceed again, that, I believe, is the proof that Providence was content with the German people… You do not realize what is hidden beneath these words in the way of human heroism, and also of human pain, and suffering, and we may say, often anxiety too, naturally, deathly anxiety on the part of all those who, especially for the first time, are placed before the trial of God in this highest court.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Address at the Opening of the Winter Relief Campaign http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adolf-hitler-address-at-the-opening-of-the-winter-relief-campaign-september-1942 (September 30, 1942) 1940s

God, Pain, Fate, People

“You live in a land that is compassionate and decent. Because we believe in the rights and dignity of our own citizenry, we are committed to defending the rights and dignity of people everywhere. America has liberated millions around the world from tyranny and terror. We’ve helped turn the tide against deadly disease in places like Africa. In our hearts we believe all are created equal under God. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is Almighty God’s gift to humanity. At home, there are thousands of platoons in the Army of compassion working to honor those beliefs. No matter what your career path, enlist. When you help another, you enrich your heart, and you strengthen the fabric of our collective goodness. Many of you have already made service a priority in your lives by volunteering during winter, spring, and summer breaks; and completing more than one-hundred community projects through Engaged Learning. I thank you for recognizing the timeless truth: of those to whom much is given, much is required.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2010s, 2015, Remarks at the SMU 100th Spring Commencement (May 2015)

God, People, Truth, World

“San Francisco, I believe, has the most disagreeable climate and locality of any city on the globe. If the winter be not unusually wet, there is some delightful weather to be enjoyed. If it be, you are flooded, and the rainy season closes to give place to what is miscalled summer — a season so cold that you require more clothing than you did in January; so damp with fogs and mists that you are penetrated to the very marrow; so windy that if you are abroad in the afternoon it is a continual struggle. Your eyes are blinded, your teeth set on edge, and your whole person made so uncomfortable by the sand that has insinuated itself through your clothing, that you could not conceive it possible to feel a sensation of comfort short of a warm bath and shower.... What sort of end the unfortunates, who spend their lives there, can expect under such circumstances, one does not easily foresee.”

Eliza Farnham (1815–1864) American novelist, feminist, abolitionist, and activist for prison reform

California, In-doors and Out (1856)

Feeling, Winter, Personality, Weather

“So fades a summer cloud away;
So sinks the gale when storms are o’er;
So gently shuts the eye of day;
So dies a wave along the shore.”

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) English author

The Death of the Virtuous. Compare: "The daisie, or els the eye of the day", Geoffrey Chaucer, Prologue of the Legend of Good Women, line 183.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The leaves in autumn do not change color from the blighting touch of frost, but from the process of natural decay. They fall when the fruit is ripened, and their work is done. And their splendid coloring is but their graceful and beautiful surrender of life when they have finished their summer offering of service to God and man. And one of the great lessons the fall of the leaf teaches is this : Do your work well, and then be ready to depart when God shall call.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 33.

Life, God, Beauty, Color

“Charm is the ultimate weapon, the supreme seduction, against which there are few defences. If you've got it, you need almost nothing else, neither money, looks, nor pedigree. It's a gift, only to be given away, and the more used the more there is. It is also a climate of behaviour set for the perpetual summer and thermostatically controlled by taste and tact.”

Laurie Lee (1914–1997) British writer

Charm, p. 67.
I Can't Stay Long (1975)

Money

“We used to run a cow-ranch,
In all that old term meant,
But all our ancient glories
In recent years have went;
We’re takin’ summer boarders,
And, puttin’ it quite rude,
It’s now the cowboy’s province
To herd the festive dude.”

Arthur Chapman (poet) (1873–1935) American poet and newspaper columnist

The Dude Ranch http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#DUDE, st. 1. Out Where the West Begins and Other Western Verses http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#outbk (1917)

“When we look at the age in which we live—no matter what age it happens to be—it is hard for us not to be depressed by it. The taste of the age is, always, a bitter one. “What kind of a time is this when one must envy the dead and buried!” said Goethe about his age; yet Matthew Arnold would have traded his own time for Goethe’s almost as willingly as he would have traded his own self for Goethe’s. How often, after a long day witnessing elementary education, School Inspector Arnold came home, sank into what I hope was a Morris chair, looked ’round him at the Age of Victoria, that Indian Summer of the Western World, and gave way to a wistful, exacting, articulate despair!
Do people feel this way because our time is worse than Arnold’s, and Arnold’s than Goethe’s, and so on back to Paradise? Or because forbidden fruits—the fruits forbidden to us by time—are always the sweetest? Or because we can never compare our own age with an earlier age, but only with books about that age?
We say that somebody doesn’t know what he is missing; Arnold, pretty plainly, didn’t know what he was having. The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. Maybe we too are living in a Golden or, anyway, Gold-Plated Age, and the people of the future will look back at us and say ruefully: “We never had it so good.” And yet the thought that they will say this isn’t as reassuring as it might be. We can see that Goethe’s and Arnold’s ages weren’t as bad as Goethe and Arnold thought them: after all, they produced Goethe and Arnold. In the same way, our times may not be as bad as we think them: after all, they have produced us. Yet this too is a thought that isn’t as reassuring as it might be.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Taste of the Age”. pp. 16–17; opening
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

People, Books, Age, World

“I know I cannot paint a flower. I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

In a letter to William Milliken (1930), quoted in Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, Laurie Lisle (1981), p. 128
1930s

Color, Flowers, Time, Sun

“Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

A Christmas Carol, viii
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Joy

“As late as the summer of 1941, the Atlantic Monthly, then a still respected magazine for literates and edited by White men, published a long article by Albert Jay Nock, in which he proved that the Jews are an Oriental race that is incompatible with ours. He was not punished and the magazine was not destroyed, strange and almost incredible as that seems today.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"A World Grown Grey With Their Breath", Liberty Bell magazine (January 1988)
1970s, 1980s

Men

“[I've] written all original music [for the forthcoming Spanish-language CD], as was [1993's] "Mi tierra" -- years back. It's very organic. It's really down to the roots. I'm in love with that record. It's very rhythmic. It's a very passionate record, and I'm thrilled. It should come out next [2007] summer. And a single probably early on in the summer. The album probably will be [out] around September”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

2007
BBC radio interview (December 13, 2006)
2006

Love, Music, Passion

“The earth has no doubt wobbled through the years. The North Pole has moved around. Today the earth is tilted over 23.5 degrees. That is why they always mount the globe on that 23.5 degree angle. Stonehenge is an interesting stone building. Apparently it was built to worship the sun at summer solstice. But today, Stonehenge does not line up. The Egyptian Temple Amen Ra was apparently built to worship the sun at summer solstice, the longest day of the year. But it doesn't line up. Eudoxus, same thing. The earth is tilted over today, and that's what causes the seasons. […] Today the earth is pretty stable. The North Pole doesn't move around very much. But could it be that something actually struck Planet Earth about the time of Noah's flood? Well that's what the scientific evidence points towards. Today the earth is tilted over and that's what causes the seasons.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

Time, Sun, Season

“But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse... The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

"Big Darkness" (22 July 2003)
2000s

Family, Fools, Failure, Future

“When you hear the music ringin' in your soul
And you feel it in your heart and it grows and grows
And it comes from the backstreet rock & roll and the healing has begun
I want you to put on your pretty summer dress
You can wear your Easter bonnet and all the rest
And I wanna make love to you yes, yes, yes and the healing has begun.”

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

And the Healing Has Begun
Song lyrics, Into the Music (1979)

Love, Making love, Music, Feeling

“[I] Went to Germany to study there and graduated from the architecture faculty in Darmstadt in 1914. I studied art during my trips through Europe; went to Paris. In the summer of 1912 I traveled more than 1200 km in Italy on foot, learning and drawing. In 1912 my works were accepted for the first time at the large exhibition in Petersburg. From 1915 in I lived in Moscow, exhibiting each year.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1926 - 1941, Autobiography of the artist' (1941)

Art, Travel, Study, Learning

“I guess I have an eclectic taste [about (500) Days of Summer, G. I. Joe, and Uncertainty all in one year], I don't just like one thing. Contrast is key. What do they say? Variety is the spice of life. My favorite actors are the chameleons, guys like Daniel Day-Lewis, Billy Bob Thornton, Meryl Streep, people who are always different.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (1981) American actor, director, producer, and writer

Salon, November 2009

Life, People, Guy

“Pleasant, summer, and slow long day;
Also pleasant to pass out of chastisement
Pleasant, the blossoms on the tops of the pear-trees;
Also pleasant, friendship with the Creator.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Pleasant Things of Taliesin

Friendship, Tree

“p>Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late
And studying all the summer night
Her matchless songs does meditate;Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grasses's fall;Ye glow-worms whose officious flame
To wandering mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim
And after foolish fires do stray;Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

The Mover to the Glow-worms

War, Way, Home, Study

“The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain — until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part IV, Ch. 5
O Pioneers! (1913)

Spring, Autumn, Tree, Winter

“Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare;
And left the flushed print in a poppy there:
Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came,
And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame.”

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) British poet

The Poppy http://books.google.com/books?id=qM8VAAAAYAAJ&q=&quot;Summer+set+lip+to+earth's+bosom+bare+And+left+the+flushed+print+in+a+poppy+there+Like+a+yawn+of+fire+from+the+grass+it+came+And+the+fanning+wind+puffed+it+to+flapping+flame&quot;&pg=PA6#v=onepage.

Grass

“ahhhh… satchel, my boy, there's nothin' like a tuna smoothie on a hot summer day…”

Darby Conley (1970) American cartoonist

groovitude, page 163
Bucky Katt

Boy

“[I first climbed Half Dome on] one of those brooding days that come just between Indian summer and winter, when the clouds are like living creatures.”

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

"South Dome", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 11 of the 11 part series "Summering in the Sierra") dated 10 November 1875, published 18 November 1875; reprinted in John Muir: Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert Engberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) page 147
1870s

Winter

“By the shore of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
At the doorway of his wigwam,
In the pleasant Summer morning,
Hiawatha stood and waited.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow book The Song of Hiawatha

Pt. XXII, Hiawatha's Departure, st. 1.
The Song of Hiawatha (1855)

Water, Waiting, Sea

“People didn’t fly the Atlantic any more if they could help it, except from bravado. Even if your plane wasn’t sabotaged or hijacked, it was certain to be behind schedule.
Not that there was much to be said for ocean travel either, since the sinking of the Paolo Rizzi last summer and the drowning of thirteen hundred passengers in a sea made foul by a hundred and eighty thousand tons of oil from the tanker she’d collided with.
Moral, definitely: stay home.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

March “RAVELED SLEEVE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

People, Travel, Home, Help

“In course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alterations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 29, The Myth of Adonis.

Spring, Autumn, Nature, Knowledge

“Hatred of the Jews was Hitler's motor and central point perhaps even the very element which motivated him. The German people, the German greatness, the Empire, they all meant nothing to him in the last analysis. For this reason, he wished in the final sentence of his testament, to fixate us Germans, even after the apocalyptic downfall in a miserable hatred of the Jews…When speaking of the victims of the bomb raids, particularly after the massive attacks on Hamburg in Summer 1943, he again and again reiterated that he would avenge these victims on the Jews; just as if the air-terror against the civilian population actually suited him in that it furnished him with a belated substitute motivation for a crime decided upon long ago and emanating from quite different layers of his personality. Just as if he wanted to justify his own mass murders with these remarks.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

Testimony of Albert Speer, Munich, (15 June 1977)

People, Motivation, Personality

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, —
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 1
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

Pain, Happiness, Sense, Tree

“The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer’s morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.”

Charles Dickens book Sketches by Boz

Source: Sketches by Boz (1836-1837), Ch. 1 : The Streets — Morning

Life, Pleasure, Business, Appearance

“Love without fear and trepidation is fire without flame and heat, day without sun, comb without honey, summer without flowers, winter without frost, sky without moon, a book without letters.”

Chrétien de Troyes Cligès

Amors sanz crieme et sans peor
Est feus sanz flame et sanz chalor,
Jorz sanz soloil, bresche sanz miel,
Estez sans flor, iverz sanz giel,
Ciaus sanz lune, livres sanz letre.
Cligès, line 3893.

Love, Books, Fear, Flowers

“Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued…. America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.”

Samantha Power (1970) Irish-American academic, author and diplomat

"Samantha Power on U.S. Foreign Policy" http://web.archive.org/web/20120608140345/http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/insight/international/samantha-power, an interview with in Molly Lanzarotta, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government (14 March 2007)

War, Way, Decision

“And what do ye say then? — That Spring long departed
Has brought forth no child to the softness and showers;
— That we slept and we dreamed through the Summer of flowers;
We dreamed of the Winter, and waking dead-hearted
Found Winter upon us and waste of dull hours.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Love is Enough (1872), Song III: It Grew Up Without Heeding

Dreams, Spring, Flowers, Winter

“This is real human drama, we're not creating some amusement park ride for the summer. Even though the movie is really exciting to watch, it's got a real pathos behind it.”

John C. Reilly (1965) American actor

“The dews of summer night did fall;
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall
And many an oak that grew thereby.”

William Julius Mickle Cumnor Hall

Stanza 1, quoted in Walter Scott's Kenilworth (1821), Ch. 6. Compare: "Jove, thou regent of the skies", Alexander Pope, The Odyssey, book ii, line 42; "Now Cynthia, named fair regent of the night", John Gay, Trivia, book iii; "And hail their queen, fair regent of the night", Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, part i, canto ii, line 90.
Cumnor Hall (1784)

Night

“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.

Autumn, Freedom

“Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

" Tithonus http://home.att.net/%7ETennysonPoetry/tith.htm", st. 1 (1860) Context: The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

“One might think, to hear some people talk, that this had been a particularly fine summer. From their point of view, I suppose, it has.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Three Worlds, Three Summers — But Not the Summer Just Past (1949).
Context: One might think, to hear some people talk, that this had been a particularly fine summer. From their point of view, I suppose, it has. They have rushed about the lakes in noisy little boats; they have permitted themselves to be dragged behind other little boats, standing more or less upright on ironing boards; they have immersed themselves in lakes into which countless summer cottage privies drain; they have laboriously pursued summer flirtations, and some of them have achieved gritty conquests on the sands; they have sat in hot little boats waiting to catch fish which they have then had to eat; they have passed many hours changing their skins from pinkish-drab to brown, erroneously believing that they are "storing up sunshine" against the winter months; they have motored penitential distances; they have taken thousands of feet of film of people whose names they will not be able to remember in November. They have amused themselves after their fashion, and I have no quarrel with them.

People, Thinking

“O farmers, pray that your summers be wet and your winters clear.”
Umida solstitia atque hiemes orate serenas, agricolae.

Virgil Georgics

Umida solstitia atque hiemes orate serenas,
agricolae.
Book I, lines 100–101
Georgics (29 BC)

Winter

“My heart is like the willow
That bends, but never breaks.
It sighs when summer jilts her,
It sings when April wakes.”

Yip Harburg (1896–1981) American song lyricist

"Irreverent Heart"
Rhymes for the Irreverent (1965)
Context: My heart is like the willow
That bends, but never breaks.
It sighs when summer jilts her,
It sings when April wakes. So you, who come a-smiling
With summer in your eyes,
Think not that your beguiling
Will take me by surprise. My heart's prepared for aching
The moment you take wing.
But not, my friend, for breaking
While there's another spring.

Singing, Heart

“The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 1
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)
Context: The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

World, Flowers

“By summer of 1966, the national scene was marked by insurrection on the campus, riots in the streets, rise in women's liberation, protest of the young, doubts about the institution of marriage, abandonment of old guiding slogans, and the crumbling of social traditions.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

The Voluntary Movie Rating System (2004)
Context: By summer of 1966, the national scene was marked by insurrection on the campus, riots in the streets, rise in women's liberation, protest of the young, doubts about the institution of marriage, abandonment of old guiding slogans, and the crumbling of social traditions. It would have been foolish to believe that movies, that most creative of art forms, could have remained unaffected by the change and torment in our society.
The result of all this was the emergence of a "new kind" of American movie — frank and open, and made by filmmakers subject to very few self-imposed restraints.

Women, Marriage

“The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 7
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)
Context: The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; 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!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Autumn, Past

“My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.”

Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) American poet

The Pardon
Context: My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive
Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.

Dogs, Grass, Dead

“If I first see a tree in the winter, I might assume that it is not a fruit-tree. But when I return in the summer to find it covered with plums, I must exclaim, 'Excuse me! You were a fruit-tree after all.' Imagine, then, that a billion years ago some beings from another part of the galaxy made a tour through the solar system in their flying saucer and found no life. They would dismiss it as 'Just a bunch of old rocks!' But if they returned today, they would have to apologize: 'Well - you were peopling rocks after all!'
You may, of course, argue that there is no analogy between the two situations. The fruit-tree was at one time a seed inside a plum, but the earth - much less the solar system or the galaxy - was never a seed inside a person. But, oddly enough, you would be wrong.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 74

Life, People, Imagination, Tree

“Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a life of perception, but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal. There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational principle; of this, one part has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And, as "life of the rational element" also has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense of activity is what we mean; for this seems to be the more proper sense of the term. Now if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle, and if we say "so-and-so" and "a good so-and-so" have a function which is the same in kind, e. g. a lyre, and a good lyre-player, and so without qualification in all cases, eminence in respect of goodness being added to the name of the function (for the function of a lyre-player is to play the lyre, and that of a good lyre-player is to do so well): if this is the case, and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.
But we must add "in a complete life."”

Aristotle book Nicomachean Ethics

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.
Book I, 1098a; §7 as translated by W. D. Ross
Variants:
One swallow does not a summer make.
As quoted in A History of Ancient Philosophy: From the Beginning to Augustine (1998) by Karsten Friis Johansen, p. 382
One swallow (they say) no Sommer doth make.
John Davies, in The Scourge of Folly (1611)
One swallow yet did never summer make.
As rendered by William Painter in Chaucer Newly Painted (1623)
One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one sunny day; similarly, one day or a short time does not make a man blessed and happy.
As translated in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends (1988), by Richard E. Grandy and ‎Richard Warner, p. 483
Nicomachean Ethics

Life, Exercises, Soul, Sense

“I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.”

Elinor Wylie book Nets to Catch the Wind

4
Nets to Catch the Wind (1921), Wild Peaches

Love, Death, Beauty, Spring

“She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

From The Ancient Sage (1885), lines 72-77

Feeling, Winter, Sun, Night

“The starry brocade of the summer night
Is linked to us as part of our estate”

Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer

"Tomorrow"
The Janitor's Boy And Other Poems (1924)
Context: The starry brocade of the summer night
Is linked to us as part of our estate;
And every bee that wings its sidelong flight
Assurance of a sweeter, fairer fate.

Parting, Night

“The feeling of a prisoner who touches a wall
And knows that beyond it valleys spread,
Oaks stand in summer splendor, a jay flies
And a kingfisher changes a river to a marvel.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"An Appeal" (1954), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
From the Rising of the Sun (1974)
Context: Tell me, as you would in the middle of the night
When we face only night, the ticking of a watch,
the whistle of an express train, tell me
Whether you really think that this world
Is your home? That your internal planet
That revolves, red-hot, propelled by the current
Of your warm blood, is really in harmony
With what surrounds you? Probably you know very well
The bitter protest, every day, every hour,
The scream that wells up, stifled by a smile,
The feeling of a prisoner who touches a wall
And knows that beyond it valleys spread,
Oaks stand in summer splendor, a jay flies
And a kingfisher changes a river to a marvel.

Feeling, Change

“Love is not a feeling to pass away,
Like the balmy breath of a summer day;
It is not — it cannot be — laid aside;
It is not a thing to forget or hide.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

Lucy's Song in The Village Coquettes (1836); later published in The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903)
Context: p>Love is not a feeling to pass away,
Like the balmy breath of a summer day;
It is not — it cannot be — laid aside;
It is not a thing to forget or hide.
It clings to the heart, ah, woe is me!
As the ivy clings to the old oak tree.Love is not a passion of earthly mould,
As a thirst for honour, or fame, or gold:
For when all these wishes have died away,
The deep strong love of a brighter day,
Though nourished in secret, consumes the more,
As the slow rust eats to the iron’s core.</p

Love, Feeling, Forgetting

“He was never loud and noisy, but calm and serene as a summer sky, and as pure.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Source: 1880s, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), pp. 263–264.
Context: I had been living four or five months in New Bedford when there came a young man to me with a copy of the Liberator, the paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison and published by Isaac Knapp, and asked me to subscribe for it. I told him I had but just escaped from slavery, and was of course very poor, and had no money then to pay for it. He was very willing to take me as a subscriber, notwithstanding, and from this time I was brought into contact with the mind of Mr. Garrison, and his paper took a place in my heart second only to the Bible. It detested slavery, and made no truce with the traffickers in the bodies and souls of men. It preached human brotherhood; it exposed hypocrisy and wickedness in high places; it denounced oppression; and with all the solemnity of "Thus saith the Lord," demanded the complete emancipation of my race. I loved this paper and its editor. He seemed to me an all-sufficient match to every opponent, whether they spoke in the name of the law or the gospel. His words were full of holy fire, and straight to the point. Something of a hero-worshiper by nature, here was one to excite my admiration and reverence. It was my privilege to listen to a lecture in Liberty Hall by Mr. Garrison, its editor. He was then a young man, of a singularly pleasing countenance, and earnest and impressive manner. On this occasion he announced nearly all his heresies. His Bible was his textbook — held sacred as the very word of the Eternal Father. He believed in sinless perfection, complete submission to insults and injuries, and literal obedience to the injunction if smitten "on one cheek to turn the other also." Not only was Sunday a Sabbath, but all days were Sabbaths, and to be kept holy. All sectarianism was false and mischievous — the regenerated throughout the world being members of one body, and the head Christ Jesus. Prejudice against color was rebellion against God. Of all men beneath the sky, the slaves, because most neglected and despised, were nearest and dearest to his great heart. Those ministers who defended slavery from the Bible were of their "father the devil"; and those churches which fellowshiped slaveholders as Christians, were synagogues of Satan, and our nation was a nation of liars. He was never loud and noisy, but calm and serene as a summer sky, and as pure. "You are the man — the Moses, raised up by God, to deliver his modern Israel from bondage," was the spontaneous feeling of my heart, as I sat away back in the hall and listened to his mighty words, — mighty in truth, — mighty in their simple earnestness.

“As summer neared, my mother suffered yet another stroke of paralysis and again I had to watch her suffer, listen to her groans, powerless to help. I used to lie awake nights and think back to the early days in Arkansas, tracing my mother’s life, reliving events, wondering why she had apparently been singled out for so much suffering, meaningless suffering, and I would feel more awe than I had ever felt in church. My mind could find no answer and I would feel rebellious against all life. But I never felt humble.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Life, Lie, Feeling, Thinking

“There seem to be magic days once in a while, with some rare quality of light that hold a body spellbound: In sub-zero weather there will be a burst of unbelievable color when the mountain turns a deep purple, a thing it refuses to do in summer. Then comes the hard part: how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you.”

Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966) American painter and illustrator

Letter to F.W Weber (1950); published in New York—Pennsylvania Collector (8 August 1991)
Context: How do ideas come? What a question! If they come of their own accord, they are apt to arrive at the most unexpected time and place. For the most part the place is out of doors, for up in this northern wilderness when nature puts on a show it is an inspiring one. There seem to be magic days once in a while, with some rare quality of light that hold a body spellbound: In sub-zero weather there will be a burst of unbelievable color when the mountain turns a deep purple, a thing it refuses to do in summer. Then comes the hard part: how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, air and space, there is no such thing as sitting down outside and trying to make a “portrait” of it. It lasts for only a minute, for one thing, and it isn’t an inspiration that can be copied on the spot...

Color, Mountain, Light, Parting

“There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Inside information p. 16
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

World, Sleep, Winter, Time

“I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Sonnet XLIII: "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why" (1923), Collected Poems", 1931
Context: Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Love, Singing

“Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song's new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.”

Arthur O'Shaughnessy Ode

Music and Moonlight (1874), Ode
Context: Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song's new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

World, Dreams, Singing, Sun

“I pray the gods will give me some relief
And end this weary job. One long full year
I've been lying here, on this rooftop,
The palace of the sons of Atreus,
Resting on my arms, just like a dog.
I've come to know the night sky, every star,
The powers we see glittering in the sky,
Bringing winter and summer to us all,
As the constellations rise and sink.”

Aeschylus Agamemnon

opening lines
Oresteia (458 BC), Agamemnon

God, Dogs, Star, Lying

“I ask myself: "What is that tree?" It is everything. It is God's voice, when the winds are abroad. It is God's thought, when in the deep stillness of the noon it is silent. It is the house which God has built for a thousand birds. It is a harbour of comfort to weary men and to the cattle of the field. It is that which has in it the record of ages. There it has stood for a century. The winter could not kill it, and the summer could not destroy it. It is full of beauty and strength. It has in it all these things ; and as different men look at it, each looks at so much of it as he needs ; but it takes ten men to see everything that there is in that tree — and they all do not half see it.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

The Nature, Importance and Liberties of Belief (1873)
Context: I look at a large tree on the lawn, and say to my neighbour: "What is that tree to you?" He looks at it, and says: "Well, I think that would cut about twenty cords of wood. You could work in a good many branches, and as the price of wood is in the market, I think I could make fifty dollars out of that tree easily, and perhaps more than that." His answer shows what the tree is to him — and it is that." I call up a boy, and say to him: "What do you think of when you look at that tree?" "Ah!" he says, "there will be a bushel of hickory-nuts on that tree, anyhow; and he begins to think how he will climb it, and shake them down, and what he will do with them. That is what the tree says to him. I say to another person: "What is that tree to you?" He says: "I would not take fifty dollars for it. Under it my cows stand in summer. The shade of that tree has stood me instead of a shed ever since I owned this farm. That tree is worth its weight in gold." He values it for its economic uses. I ask a painter: "What is that tree to you?" At once he says: "Do you see what an exquisite form it has? How picturesque it is? If you were to take it and put it in the foreground of the landscape that I am working on, what a magnificent effect you would get!" It has an aesthetic value to him. I ask another man: "What is it to you?" He goes into an explanation of its structure and qualities. He is a botanist, and he has his peculiar view of it. I ask myself: "What is that tree?" It is everything. It is God's voice, when the winds are abroad. It is God's thought, when in the deep stillness of the noon it is silent. It is the house which God has built for a thousand birds. It is a harbour of comfort to weary men and to the cattle of the field. It is that which has in it the record of ages. There it has stood for a century. The winter could not kill it, and the summer could not destroy it. It is full of beauty and strength. It has in it all these things; and as different men look at it, each looks at so much of it as he needs; but it takes ten men to see everything that there is in that tree — and they all do not half see it.
So it is with truths. Men sort them. They bring different faculties to bear in considering them. One person has philosophical reason; another has factual reason. One man brings one part of his mind to it; another brings to it another part of his mind. The truth is larger than any one man's thought of it. The truth of God usually has relations that stretch out in such a way that men may see it very differently, and all of them be true in spots, although they do not have the whole truth.

Men, God, Age, Beauty

“The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.”

Upton Sinclair book The Profits of Religion

Book One : The Church of the Conquerors, "The Priestly Lie"
The Profits of Religion (1918)
Context: When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness—that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.

Science, Winter, Time, Night

“Last summer, the people of Iran achieved something unprecedented in the history of the 31-year-old Islamic Republic. For the first time, the Iranian people coordinated mass-scale demonstrations against this totalitarian theocratic regime. These demonstrations and protests continue even today, questioning – well beyond the election results of last June – the very legitimacy of the regime and the so-called Supreme Leader Khamenei.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

“Iran: From Theocracy to Democracy” http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=441&page=1, George Washington University, April 13, 2010. Speeches, 2010

People, History, Question, Time

“When we were living in Colorado there was snowfall. Our cat — I’m a cat man — wanted to get out of the house so I opened a door for him but he wouldn’t leave. Just kept on crying. He’d seen snow before and I couldn’t understand it. I kept opening other doors for him and he still wouldn’t leave. Then Ginny said, «Oh, he’s looking for a door into summer». I threw up my hands, told her not to say another word, and wrote the novel «The Door Into Summer» in 13 days.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Cats, Understanding, Housing, Cry

“I feared his visit. I was twenty-four, and the religious revival within myself was at its height. Earlier that summer, I had discovered Kierkegaard, and each week I brought back to the apartment one more of the Princeton University Press’s elegant and expensive editions of his works. They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator’s prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard’s own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. The demons with which he wrestled—Hegel and his avatars—were unknown to me, so Kierkegaard at his desk seemed to me to be writhing in the clutches of phantoms, slapping at silent mosquitoes, twisting furiously to confront presences that were not there.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

The Astronomer by John Updike from Pigeon Feathers: and other stories p. 125 1959, 1962 Ballantine Books

Books, Fear, Beauty, Home

“In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a commion mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", pp. 324–325
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Love, Life, Children, World

“I marvel at the complacency of Ministers in the face of the frightful experiences through which we have all so newly passed. I look with wonder upon our thoughtless crowds disporting themselves in the summer sunshine, and upon this unfocused, unheeding House of Commons, which seems to have no higher function than to cheer a Minister. But what is happening across the narrow seas? A terrible process is astir. Germany is arming.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

That mighty race who fought and almost vanquished the whole world is on the march again. The whole nation is inspired with the idea of retrieving and avenging their defeat in the Great War. They have arisen from the pit of disaster in monstrous guise. ... And we are still pestering France to disarm, and we are still disarmed ourselves!
'How I Would Procure Peace', Daily Mail (9 July 1934), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 825, n. 3
The 1930s

Housing, Sea

“Since the House had been prorogued in the summer much work was done in France. The French had shewn themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Speech in the House of Commons (9 February 1790), quoted in J. C. D. Clark, 'Introduction', in Clark (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 66.
1790s

World, Law, Art, Time

“The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 84

Bitch

“In the astronomical and physical division of the work, will be found a general rule for determining the correction on account of aberration; a comparison of observations on the figure of the earth; a table of the order of electrical excitation; a chart of the variation of the compass, and of the trade winds; formulae for finding the heat of summer and winter; remarks on the theory of the winds; and a comparative table of all the mechanical properties of a variety of natural bodies.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Nature, Winter

“We have gone out several times this summer to gather simples and linden blossoms, etc. In each excursion we discover something marvelous, beautiful, and useful in the magnificent forests of Indiana. At each step we can admire the grandeur, the power, the goodness of God. How bountifully He provides for all our wants -- I would even say for our pleasures! I love our woods and solitude very much; …”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

To the Right Reverend J. Bouvier, Bishop of Le Mans, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, 1850-07-10.

Love, God, Pleasure, Making love

“What I have created here in Italy is neither very big nor profound (in the old sense of the word), but formidable. This summer I painted paintings that are the most profound that exist in the absolute. Let me explain these things somewhat.... profoundness as I understand it, and as Nietzsche intended it, is elsewhere than where it has been searched for until now.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

My paintings are small (the biggest is 50 x 70 cm), but each of them is an enigma, each contains a poem, an atmosphere (Stimmung) and a promise that you can not find in other paintings. It brings me immense joy to have painted them – when I exhibit them, possibly in Munich this spring, it will be a revelation for the whole world Quote from De Chirico's letter to Mr. Fritz Gartz, Florence, 26 Jan. 1910; 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. 562 1908 - 1920

Search, Understanding, Sense, Painting

“I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 29 (p. 162)

Love, Bad luck, Making love, Thinking

“It never occurred to me that I had brought him not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember.”

André Aciman book Call Me By Your Name

Part 2, p. 77
Call Me By Your Name (2007)

World

“I'm reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940, and the general calls up Churchill and says, 'It's over,' and Churchill says, 'How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?'”

Chris Matthews (1945) American news anchor

He said, 'It's over.'
comparing Bernie Sanders winning the Nevada caucus to the Nazi invasion of France
2020-02-24
Chris Matthews rebuked by MSNBC colleague for comparing Sanders win to Nazi invasion
Igor Derysh
Salon
https://www.salon.com/2020/02/24/chris-matthews-rebuked-by-msnbc-colleague-for-comparing-sanders-win-to-nazi-invasion/

Reading, Night

“As young people, my generation would see a lot of death. I don't think I ever grew accustomed to it. It came in darkness and fervor, by our airplanes, rifles, parachutes, and tanks. But there was something about that first death I experienced the summer of 1939 when I was just eighteen, years before the war, that stayed with me so strongly. Those first few seasons after my father died were dark indeed.”

Lynn Compton (1921–2012) Easy Company soldier turned noted jurist

Source: Call of Duty: My Life Before, During and After the Band of Brothers (2008), p. 54

Death, War, People, Thinking

“Shedding tears we spend the night in this deepening dark,
Our day is but a long struggle against an uphill path,
Not a single moment goes when we don't bewail our lot,
Lo! we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls.
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
We wish you well, O friends, leave you to His care,
And entrust our Qaiser Bagh to the blowing air,
While we give our tender heart to terror and despair.
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
I am betrayed by my friends, whom should I excuse?
Except God the gracious, I have no refuge,
I can't escape exile, under any excuse.
Lo, we cast a lingering look on the doors and wells,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
I have been told this much too, ah! the scourage of time!
The servant calls his master 'mad,' a travesty of the mind.
As for me, I cannoy help, but rot in alien climes.
Lo, we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are gong afar!
This is the cause of my regret, to whom should I complain?
What wondrous goods of mine are subjected to disdain,
My exile has raised a storm in the whole domain.
Lo we cast a lingering look on the doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!
You cannot help but suffer, O heart, the sharp strings of grief,
They didn't spare even the things essential for the mourning meets,
In the scorching summer heat, I've no cover or sheet.
Akhtar now departs from all his friends and mates,
There is little time or need to dwell upon my fate,
Save, O God, my countrymen from the dangers lying in wait!
Lo, we cast a lingering look on these doors and walls,
Fare thee well, my countrymen, we are going afar!”

Wajid Ali Shah (1822–1887) Nawab of Awadh

Masterpieces of Patriotic Urdu Poetry, p. 63-67
Poetry

God, Fate, Lying, Tear

“It was an unusually hot afternoon. One of those days all slowly ambling bumblebees and honeysuckle and so forth, at which the English countryside, when it puts its mind to it, excels, and quite unlike any summer day anywhere else. Calm and still and lovely, but never without a sense of something impending. The sort of day one misses even as one experiences it.”

China Miéville book The Design

The Design (p. 377)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

Love, Making love, Sense

“By 1980, the work of Feldstein, Boskin, Summers, and others had convinced many economists that U.S. taxes were in fact a significant obstacle to investment. Nor was this all: another major U.S. policy, the Social Security system, was also discouraging saving and investment.”

Paul Krugman book Peddling Prosperity

Source: Peddling Prosperity (1994), Ch. 2 : Taxes, Regulation, and Growth

“School strike week 43. And even though summer holidays are here and school is over, we go on. #fridaysforfuture #schoolstrike4climate #climatestrike”

Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist

Twitter post https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1139412721907064833 (14 June 2019) 2019, June 2019

School, Holiday

“Summer passed into fall, and soon winter came.
It’s a small world after all.
We should always be lenient towards others,
so that benevolence will linger in mind.”

Deng Feng-Zhou (1949) Chinese poet, Local history writer, Taoist Neidan academics and Environmentalist.

(zh-TW) 夏去秋來繼又冬，人生無處不相逢。
寬留後路尋階下，一點恩情記在胸。

"Leniency" (厚道)

Source: Deng Feng-Zhou, "Deng Feng-Zhou Classical Chinese Poetry Anthology". Volume 6, Tainan, 2018: 83.

World, Winter

“Yes, star-crossed in pleasure, the stream flows on by
Yes, as we're sated in leisure, we watch it fly, yes
And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me...
Hours are like diamonds, don't let them waste...
Drink in your summer, gather your corn...
The dreams of the nighttime will vanish by dawn”

Mick Jagger (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

Time Waits for No One (co-written with Keith Richards) on the Rolling Stones' 1974 album It's Only Rock 'n Roll (1973).
Lyrics

Pleasure, Dreams, Star, Drink

“It was the back nine [episodes of a season], was the backbreaker for us, right? You [can] kind of figure out the first ten over the summer; you pull three more out of nowhere; and then the back nine is just-- you're Sandra Bullock in Gravity.”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012 — Present), Season 3 (2014)

Season

“I'm waiting. … For something new and strange,
Something I've dreamt about in some deep sleep,
Truer than any waking,
Heard about, long ago, so long ago,
In sunshine and the summer grass of childhood,
When the sky seems so near.
I do not know its shape, its will, its purpose
And yet all day its will has been upon me,
More real than any voice I ever heard,
More real than yours or mine or our dead child's,
More real than all the voices there upstairs,
Brawling above their cups, more real than light.
And there is light in it and fire and peace,
Newness of heart and strangeness like a sword,
And all my body trembles under it,
And yet I do not know.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Innkeeper's wife
Source: A Child is Born (1942)

Peace, Sleep, Light, Grass

“The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system; and this administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes to be enacted and become effective in 1963.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York

Business, Personality

“Take some time and put the Bible on your summer reading list. Try and stick with it cover to cover.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

Not because it teaches history; we've shown you it doesn't. Read it because you'll see for yourself what the Bible is all about. It sure isn't great literature. If it were published as fiction, no reviewer would give it a passing grade. There are some vivid scenes and some quotable phrases, but there's no plot, no structure, there's a tremendous amount of filler, and the characters are painfully one-dimensional. Whatever you do, don't read the Bible for a moral code: it advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition, and murder. Read it because: we need more atheists — and nothin will get you there faster than readin' the damn Bible.
"The Bible: Fact or Fiction?" Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, season 2 episode 6 (6 May 2004)
2000s

Time, Reading

“The murder of George Floyd launched a summer of protest we hadn’t seen since the Civil Rights era in the ‘60s — protests that unified people of every race and generation in peace and with purpose”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

20 April 2021 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/04/20/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-verdict-in-the-derek-chauvin-trial-for-the-death-of-george-floyd/ 2021, April 2021

People, Peace

“In the hood, even if you're not a hardcore criminal, crime is in your life in some way or another. There are degrees of it. It's everyone from the mom buying some food that fell off the back of a truck to feed her family, all the way up to the gangs selling military-grade weapons and hardware. The hood made me realize that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn't do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programs and summer jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn't discriminate.”

Trevor Noah book Born a Crime

page 209
Born a Crime

Life, Family, Food, Way

“We have to understand what sports is and what sports isn't and I think if we do that in the right way sports can come back appropriately that's what we want sports to come back appropriate and I think that's what the governor was eluding to this summer.”

Larry Baer (1957) MLB Executive

SF Giants CEO Larry Baer weighs in on MLB returning without fans https://abc7news.com/sf-giants-when-does-baseball-season-start-mlb-date-new-rules/6195145/, ABC 7 News (May 19, 2020)

Way, Understanding, Thinking, Sport

“We'd only speak Korean at home. They [parents] wouldn't let us have sleepovers and sent us away to Korean church camp during the summers. We had weird food concoctions, too, so instead of spaghetti bolognese, we had rice bolognese with kimchi.”

Jamie Chung (1983) American actress

On her childhood memories in "Jamie Chung, Star of ‘Premium Rush, On Her Road from The Real World to Hollywood" in The Daily Beast (25 August 2012) https://www.thedailybeast.com/jamie-chung-star-of-premium-rush-on-her-road-from-the-real-world-to-hollywood

Food, Home, Parent