“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 rumour of sadness and change.”
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
“Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart . . . There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust trees were in bloom and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air.”
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And too often is his gold complexion dimm’d:
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or natures changing course untrimm’d;
By thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”
“The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit. It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage, but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature.”
“She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them. The year before they had spent part of the summer with their grandmother Pontellier in Iberville. Feeling secure regarding their happiness and welfare, she did not miss them except with an occasional intense longing. Their absence was a sort of relief, though she did not admit this, even to herself. It seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her.”
“Idgie smiled back (...) and looked up into the clear blue sky that reflected in her eyes, and she was as happy as anybody who is in love in the summertime can be.”
“Tough mindedness without tenderheartedness is cold and detached, leaving one’s life in a perpetual winter devoid of the warmth of spring in the gentle heat of summer. ”
“If this had happened two summers ago, Eleanor would have run and banged on the door herself. She would have yelled at Richie to stop. She would have called 911 at the very, very least. But now that seemed like something a child would do, or a fool.”
“I knew something was wrong with me that summer ...all the little successes I’d totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.
I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
“I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.”
“One of the gasping joys of summer was my daily bath in the spring. It was cold water, I never stayed in long, but it woke me up and started me into the day with a vengeance.”
“The moment I stopped spending so much time chasing the big pleasure of life. I began to enjoy the little ones, like watching the stars dancing in the moonlit sky or soaking in the sunbeams of a glorious summer morning.”
“For a moment, to Annemarie, listening, it seemed like all the earlier times, the happy visits to the farm in the past with summer daylight extending beyond bedtime, with the children tucked away in the bedrooms and the grownups downstairs talking.”
“Until that summer, I had kept count of all the moons since the time my brother and I were alone upon the island. For each one that came and went I cut a mark in the pole beside the door of my house. There were many marks, from the roof to the floor. But after that summer I did not cut them any more. The passing of the moons now had come to mean little, and I only made marks to count the four seasons of the year. The last year I did not count those.”
“One day in summer Frog was not feeling well. Toad said, ‘Frog, you are looking quite green.’
‘But I always look green,’ said Frog. ‘I am a frog.’
‘Today you look very green even for a frog,’ said Toad.”
“It was a summer I would never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was.”
“Summer is over. The fields and forests are gone, and now there are just streets and cars everywhere. When Rosa and her aunt go out for a walk, Rosa sits down on the sidewalk. Or she lies down and closes her eyes. ”
“Summer would not last forever; he knew it and Ronia knew it. But now they began to live as if it would, and as far as possible they pushed away all painful thoughts of winter.”
“As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when by brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery.”
“In the summer of raging storms Lara Ritchie must fight the storm within herself. It is through the unexpected friendship with a kindred spirit that Lara discovers the strength to face up to her ordeals.”
“Every summer Stina visited her grandfather in his house by the sea. And every summer she went treasure hunting. Smooth sticks, sea stars, feathers, there was so much to be found.”
“One is the Springmouse who turns on the showers. Then comes the Summer who paints in the flowers. The Fallmouse is next with the walnuts and wheat. And Winter is last…with little cold feet.”
“Erica Timperley, city girl and motor-bike buff, is all set to spend her summer holiday messing around with The Crowd in the multi-storey car park -until Mum tells her that she is going to have a lovely holiday in the country. ”
“It was August, and the summer streets of the city had been crowded all day with tourists who could not speak English, or who could speak English but could not read a mar, or who could do neither, nor even recognize a castle when they saw one.”
“My grandmother always dressed in white, summer and winter. She had come to Venice from England at twenty years old and instantly ‘fell like a ripe apple’ into the arms of a worker at the shipyard -he became my mother’s father.”
“The first notes were low and murmuring. Again they made Griselda think of little rippling brooks in summer, and now and then there a sort of hum as of insects buzzing in the warm sunshine near. This humming gradually increased, till at last Griselda was conscience of nothing more - everything seemed to be humming, herself to, till at last she fell asleep.”
″ ‘I don’t think I like boys,’ answered the Swallow. ‘Last summer, when I was staying on the river, there were two rude boys, the miller’s sons, who were always throwing stones at me.’ ”
“As the Little House settled down on her new foundation, she smiled happily. Once again she could watch the sun and moon and stars. Once again she could watch Spring and Summer and Fall and Winter come and go.”
“The children never went to the country or lake in the summer, the way their friends did, because their father was dead and their mother worked very hard on the newspaper, the one almost nobody on the block took.”
‘She loved both spring and fall. At the turning of the year things seemed to stir in her, that were lost sight of in the commonplace stretches of winter and summer.”
“As everyone knows, if the first butterfly you see is yellow the summer will be a happy one. If it is white then you will just have a quiet summer. Black and brown butterflies should never be talked about- they are much too sad.”
“There, perhaps, the Mistress Hill who was to become Mistress Masham- or even Mistress Morley herself, had sat in silks and laces, in the summer weather, drinking tay.”
When Slim, the hired man who spends his spring and summer months working on the Pennsylvania farm owned by eight-year-old Benjy’s father, must head south for the winter, he entrusts his tame fox Goldie to the young Amish boy.
“When the bees’ feet shake the bells of the heather, and the ruddy strings of the sap-stealing dodder are twined about the green spikes of the furze, it is summertime on the commons.”
“The tree was a friend to all, and it had one human friend, who as a child had seen it first when trailing in summer after her father hunting the otters of the brook.”
“Autumn Fires
In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!
Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The gay smoke towers.
Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!”
“The Tea Party
In the pleasant green Garden
We sat down to tea;
‘Do you take sugar?’ and
‘Do you take milk?’
She’d got a new gown on-
A smart one of silk.
We all were so happy
As happy could be,
On that bright Summer’s day
When she asked us to tea.”
“When summer comes, the root children are free to play in the beautiful fields, ponds and meadows. But when autumn comes and the cold wind starts to blow, it’s time to go back to their cosy home below ground.”
“All summer they play in fields, ponds and meadows before returning in the autumn to Mother Earth, who welcomes them home and puts them to bed once more.”
“Spring comes when the cuckoo calls, ad the cuckoo’s disappearance means that summer is coming, then autumn, and then the cold, hard winter.′ Everyone agreed that was very clever. ‘My idea is this: if we caught a cuckoo and kept it in Gotham all year, then spring would have to say in Gotham, too.”