Wallace Stegner Quotes

It's one of my favorite seasons of the year: Back to School. As a kid, I loved fresh school supplies, new outfits, the change of seasons, and the chance to crack open a new textbook.

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.

Dobbin at manger pulls his hay: Gone is another summer's day.

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.

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

Summer's lease hath all too short a date.

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

Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.

Linus: It was a short summer, Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown: And it looks like it's gonna be a looong winter.

There is no sports event like Opening Day of baseball, the sense of beating back the forces of darkness and the National Football League.

Fresh spring! / The world is only Nine days old - / These fields and mountains!

I've always loved the first day of school better than the last day of school. Firsts are best because they are beginnings.

Always keep mint on your windowsill in August, to ensure that buzzing flies will stay outside, where they belong. Don't think the summer is over, even when roses droop and turn brown and the stars shift position in the sky. Never presume August is a safe or reliable time of the year.

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

. . perhaps the greatest satisfaction on the first day of the season is the knowledge in the evening that the whole of the rest of the season is to come.

Now the peak of summer's past, the sky is overcast And the love we swore would last for an age seems deceit.

Old April wanes, and her last dewy morn Her death-bed steeps in tears; to hail the May New blooming blossoms neath the sun are born, And all poor April's charms are swept away.

How bravely Autumn paints upon the sky The gorgeous fame of Summer which is fled!

Summer treads on heels of spring.

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.