Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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.

The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer.

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

It is a sad moment when the first phlox appears. It is the amber light indicating the end of the great burst of early summer and suggesting that we must now start looking forward to autumn. Not that I have any objection to autumn as a season, full of its own beauty; but I just cannot bear to see another summer go, and I recoil from what the first hint of autumn means.

But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.

Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

There is a time in the last few days of summer when the ripeness of autumn fills the air.

Behold congenial Autumn comes, the Sabbath of the Year.

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.

When autumn comes, it doesn't ask. It just walks in, where it left you last. And you never know, when it starts; until there's fog inside the glass around your summer heart.

I like autumn. The drama of it; the golden lion roaring through the back door of the year, shaking its mane of leaves. A dangerous time; of violent rages and deceptive calm, of fireworks in the pockets and conkers in the fist.

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.

My favorite season is autumn, and Maine is lovely for that reason. In Maine, autumn begins on July 29. That's when you start building a fire in the fireplace and the leaves literally start falling from the trees. It is a cold and rugged and a beautiful place that reminds you with its many death traps - its painfully cold oceans, its sharp, jagged beaches, and perilous cliffsides - that nature doesn't care whether you live or die.

Autumn truly is what summer pretends to be: the best of all seasons. It is as glorious as summer is tedious; as subtle as summer is obvious; as refreshing as summer is wearying. Autumn seems like paradise.

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

Autumn is full of leave-taking.

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.

What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.

To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]

Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.