Fall Quotes to Help You Appreciate the Season

We are well into fall — in two weeks we’ll be draped in all things scary for Halloween and in six weeks, we’ll be clearing the table for a Thanksgiving turkey. But we don’t want to wish away fall for the fun things ahead! We want to enjoy as much as we can while it’s here. In honor of the season, here are a few fall quotes to help you appreciate this time of year.

“Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands, come off the whisper of the silk hangers, the lap of the flat spear leaves.” Carl Sandburg

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” L.M. Montgomery

“Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground.” Andrea Gibson

“Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile.” William Cullen Bryant

“The stripped and shapely maple grieves the ghosts of her departed leaves. The ground is hard, as hard as stone. The year is old, the birds are flown.” John Updike

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.” Emily Brontë

“Then summer fades and passes and October comes. We’ll smell smoke then, and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure.” Thomas Wolfe

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the daylight hours in the open air.” Nathaniel Hawthorne

“When everything that ticked has stopped, and space stares, all around, or grisly frosts, first autumn morns, repeal the beating ground.” Emily Dickinson

“From the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn–that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness–that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.” Jane Austen

“Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.” Rémy de Gourmont

“Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.” Carol Bishop Hipps

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace, as I have seen in one autumnal face.” John Donne

“There ought to be gardens for all months in the year, in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in season.” Sir Francis Bacon

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.” Rainer Maria Rilke