The End of Autumn

Autumn is one of my favourite times of year. Leaves change colour, the harvest comes in and the air has a crispness not felt since spring. Now that it's almost over I want to remember how great it was.


Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

- George Eliot


Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

- Albert Camus


My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

- Robert Frost


Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.

- Robert Browning


There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!

- Percy Bysshe Shelley


Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.

- Hal Borland


I know the lands are lit, with all the autumn blaze of Goldenrod.

- Helen Hunt Jackson


You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast


I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.

― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables


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


Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,
We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!

― Humbert Wolfe


To-day I think
Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
And the square mustard field;

Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;

The smoke's smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.

It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth."

― Edward Thomas


It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.

― P.G. Wodehouse