Alice Hoffman Quotes

Through the dripping weeks that follow One another slow, and soak Summer's extinguished fire and autumn's drifting smoke.

When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

For summer there, bear in mind, is a loitering gossip, that only begins to talk of leaving when September rises to go.

Now I realize that the trees blossom in Spring and bear fruit in Summer without seeking praise; and they drop their leaves in Autumn and become naked in Winter without fearing blame.

Other seasons come abruptly but ask so little when they do. Winter is the only one that has to be relearned.

How softly summer shuts, without the creaking of a door.

Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

Fair summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore: So fair a summer look for never more. All good things vanish, less than in a day, Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay. Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year; The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear.

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy.

But days even earlier than these, in April, have a charm, — even days that seem raw and rainy, when the sky is dull and a bequest of March - wind lingers, chasing the squirrel from the tree and the children from the meadows. There is a fascination in walking through these bare early woods, – there is such a pause of preparation, winter's work is so cleanly and thoroughly done. Everything is taken down and put away.

What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss.

You’re my change of skin / my summer-winter-fall / I spring to follow you / this loss is beautiful.

Surely 't is better, when summer is over To die when all fair things are fading away.

I don't think you necessarily have to put away your summer closet to go into fall. You can incorporate the fall pieces into your normal summer wardrobe.

Something told him that something was coming to an end. Not the world, exactly. Just the summer. There would be other summers, but there would never be one like this. Ever again.