“
I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death
”
”
Lin Yutang
“
my mother was taught the ch'an concept of happiness, which was to find satisfaction in small things. i was taught to appreciate the fresh air in the morning, the colour of leaves turning red in autumn and the water's smoothness when i soaked my hands in the basin.
”
”
Anchee Min
“
I ate breakfast in the kitchen by candle-light, and then drove the five miles to the station through the most glorious October colouring. The sun came up on the way, and the swamp maples and dogwood glowed crimson and orange and the stone walls and cornfields sparkled with hoar frost; the air was keen and clear and full of promise. I knew something was going to happen.
”
”
Jean Webster (Daddy-Long-Legs (Daddy-Long-Legs, #1))
“
It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.
”
”
Henry James
“
He Looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.
”
”
Thomas Hardy (The Woodlanders)
“
Green is the soul of Spring. Summer may be dappled with yellow, Autumn with orange and Winter with white but Spring is drenched with the colour green.
”
”
Paul F. Kortepeter (Tea with Victoria Rose)
“
I love the start of autumn when the trees in my garden change the colour of their leaves in one last dazzling display.
”
”
Michael Caine (The Elephant to Hollywood)
“
I moved forward in the trace of their footsteps as in a waking dream where the scent of a newly blown poppy is no longer a perfume but a blossoming: where the deep red of a maple leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby.
”
”
Kim Thúy (Ru)
“
It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.
”
”
Bill Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away)
“
I love the arrival of a new season — each one bringing with it its own emotion: spring is full of hope; summer is freedom; autumn is a colourful release, and winter brings an enchanting peace. It's hard to pick which one I enjoy the most — each time the new one arrives, I remember its beauty and forget the previous one whose qualities have started to dim.
”
”
Giovanna Fletcher (Christmas With Billy and Me (Billy and Me, #1.5))
“
November again. It’s more winter than autumn. That’s not mist. It’s fog. The sycamore seeds hit the glass in the wind like – no, not like anything else, like sycamore seeds hitting window glass. There’ve been a couple of windy nights. The leaves are stuck to the ground with the wet. The ones on the paving are yellow and rotting, wanwood, leafmeal. One is so stuck that when it eventually peels away, its leafshape left behind, shadow of a leaf, will last on the pavement till next spring. The furniture in the garden is rusting. They’ve forgotten to put it away for the winter. The trees are revealing their structures. There’s the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there’s a wide-open rose, still. Look at the colour of it.
”
”
Ali Smith (Autumn (Seasonal, #1))
“
The gold and scarlet leaves that littered the countryside in great drifts whispered and chuckled among themselves, or took experimental runs from place to place, rolling like coloured hoops among the trees. It was as if they were practising something, preparing for something, and they would discuss it excitedly in rustly voices as they crowded round the tree trunks.
”
”
Gerald Durrell (My Family and Other Animals (Corfu Trilogy, #1))
“
Rest your eyes well before September because with all its colours autumn is coming to visit them!
”
”
Mehmet Murat ildan
“
In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil. And at no season, safe perhaps in Daffodil time, do we get such superb colour effects as from August to November.
”
”
George Eliot
“
The tree-lined streets formed golden archways of autumnal colour, and whatever foliage had already fallen formed a russet carpet that came alive and danced around our wheels as we drove over it.
”
”
Alex Kefford (Two Jeeps)
“
The thing about trees is that they know what to do. When a leaf loses its colour, it's not because its time is up and it's dying, it's because the tree is taking back into itself the nutrients the leaf's been holding in reserve for it, out there on the twig, and why leaves change colour in autumn is because the tree is preparing for winter, it's filling itself with its own stored health so it can withstand the season. Then, clever tree, it literally pushes the used leaf off with the growth that's coming behind it. But because that growth has to protect itself through winter too, the tree fills the little wound in its branch or twig where the leaf was with a protective corky stuff which seals it against cold and bacteria.
Otherwise every leaf lost would be an open wound on a tree and a single tree would be covered in thousands of little wounds.
Clever trees.
”
”
Ali Smith (Artful)
“
Autumn was his favourite time of year, not simply for its changing colours but for the crispness in the air and the sharpness of the light. As the leaves fell the landscape revealed itself, like a painting being cleaned or a building being renewed. He could see the underlying shape of things. This was what he wanted, he decided: moments of clarity and silence.
”
”
James Runcie (Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (The Grantchester Mysteries #1))
“
The lucidity, the clarity of light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast acorn cups underfoot in the russet slime of the dead bracken where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lancinating cold of the approaching winter that grips hold of your belly and squeezed it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush.
”
”
Angela Carter (Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories)
“
Colourful autumn is a tristful travel to the pale Planet of Melancholy!
”
”
Mehmet Murat ildan
“
Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species. Nevertheless the present specimen, with his narrow hay-coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour, seemed to be content with life.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (The Death of the Moth and Other Essays)
“
Besides, she had just reached the autumnal period of womanhood, in which reflection is combined with tenderness, in which the beginning of maturity colours the face with a more intense flame, when strength of feeling mingles with experience of life, and when, having completely expanded, the entire being overflows with a richness in unison with its beauty. Never had she possessed more sweetness, more leniency. Secure in the thought that she would not err, she abandoned herself to a sentiment which seemed to her justified by her sorrows. And, moreover, it was so innocent and fresh! What an abyss lay between the coarseness of Arnoux and the adoration of Frederick!
”
”
Gustave Flaubert (Sentimental Education)
“
Her eyes were a different shade of green today, a soft green. The colour of autumn leaves just before they started turning brown. He had known her for three years, and there were no two days that she looked the same. Every day was a different form of beauty that was slotted irrepressibly into his memory.
”
”
Jacqueline Francis - The Journal
“
When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.
The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.
”
”
Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate)
“
In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London.
”
”
Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde)
“
Life is like an Autumn; short but colourful.
”
”
Zain Baloch
“
Do you know why the leaves change colour, Makin?" They did look spectacular. The forest had grown around us as we traveled and the canopy burned with colour, from deepest red to flame orange, an autumn fire spreading in defiance of the rain.
"I don't know," he said, "Why do they change?"
"Before a tree sheds a leaf it pumps it full of all the poison it can't rid itself of otherwise. That red there—that's a man's skin blotching with burst veins after an assassin spikes his last meal with roto-weed. The poison spreading through him before he dies.
”
”
Mark Lawrence (Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, #3))
“
I’ve been able to see all that I’ve needed, my love: your kindness, your compassion, your tenderness, your love, and your soul. These are all I care about.
Of course you do and I don’t expect anything different from you. But next time, I will give you more. You’ll see the colours of every season.
”
”
Jacquie Underdown (The Paler Shade Of Autumn)
“
summer ends and autumn begins. The trees retract their sap in a hurry and the resulting bright colours must be a panic-stricken response to the sudden withdrawal of that life-blood. Because the sight's so beautiful, you forget what this gorgeous display actually represents. Decay and death. If only human death were so glorious.
”
”
Linda Gillard (Untying the Knot)
“
It was a lovely autumn day with a blue sky: I made my way through a lead-coloured world, and I realized that my mother’s accident was affecting me far more than I had thought it would. I could not really see why. It had wrenched her out of the framework, the role, the set of images in which I had imprisoned her: I recognized her in this patient in bed, but I did not recognize either the pity or the kind of disturbance that she aroused in me.
”
”
Simone de Beauvoir (A Very Easy Death)
“
I wish I were like the fall...I wish I were like the fall
I wish I were like the fall, silent, with no desires at all
My wishes' leaves would one by one turn sallow-gold
My eyes' sun would grow cold
The heaven of my breast would fill with pain
And suddenly a storm of grief would seize my heart
Like rain my tears would start
And stain my dress
Oh...how lovely then, if I were like the fall
Feral and bitter, with colours seeping into one another, so beautiful
- In Love with Sadness
”
”
Forugh Farrokhzad (The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women)
“
…….one horizon always hides another and it goes on like that into infinity, to the unspeakable beauty of renewal, to intangible rapture. As for me, it is true all the way to the possibility of this book, to the moment when my words glide across the curve of your lips, to the sheets of white paper that put up with my trail, or rather the trail of those who have walked before me, for me. I moved forward in the trace of their footsteps as in a waking dream where the scent of a newly blown poppy is no longer a perfume but a blossoming: where the deep red of a maple leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby.
”
”
Kim Thúy (Ru)
“
The heat finally left space for breathing and crisp air. The trees undressed and coloured the streets and I found myself changing with the season. I so badly wanted to be that force of nature, that fire no one can touch, but I was tired. Tired, tired, tired, of being me and if I had one inch of energy to be something beautiful, I would have, but all I could care about was to make it home before it got dark.
”
”
Charlotte Eriksson (Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps)
“
When she had arranged her household affairs, she came to the library and bade me follow her. Then, with the mirror still swinging against her knees, she led me through the garden and the wilderness down to a misty wood. It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady's knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires.
("The Basilisk")
”
”
R. Murray Gilchrist (Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror)
“
When the child asks: "Why have the leaves turned red?" or "Why does it snow?" we launch into explanations which have no obvious connection with the question. Leaves are red because it is cold, we say. What has cold to do with colour? How is the child to know that we are talking of abstract connections between atmospheric conditions and leaf chemistry? And why should he care? The child has asked 'why,' not 'how,' and certainly not 'how much.' And why should he care the molecular structure of water is believed to be such that at low temperatures it forms rigid bonds which make it appear as ice or snow? None of these abstractions says anything about what the child experiences: the redness of leaves and the cool, tickling envelopment by snow. The living response would be quite different.
'Why are the leaves red Dad?"
"Because it is so beautiful, child. Don't you see how beautiful it is, all these autumn colours?"
There is no truer answer. That is how the leaves are red. An answer which does not invoke questions, which does not lead the child into an endless series of questions, to which each answer is a threshold. The child will hear later on that a chemical reaction occurs in those leaves. It is bad enough, then; let us not make the world uninhabitable for the child too soon.
”
”
Neil Evernden (The Natural Alien)
“
The Native Americans, whose wisdom Thoreau admired, regarded the Earth itself as a sacred source of energy. To stretch out on it brought repose, to sit on the ground ensured greater wisdom in councils, to walk in contact with its gravity gave strength and endurance. The Earth was an inexhaustible well of strength: because it was the original Mother, the feeder, but also because it enclosed in its bosom all the dead ancestors. It was the element in which transmission took place. Thus, instead of stretching their hands skyward to implore the mercy of celestial divinities, American Indians preferred to walk barefoot on the Earth: The Lakota was a true Naturist – a lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest on the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. Walking, by virtue of having the earth’s support, feeling its gravity, resting on it with every step, is very like a continuous breathing in of energy. But the earth’s force is not transmitted only in the manner of a radiation climbing through the legs. It is also through the coincidence of circulations: walking is movement, the heart beats more strongly, with a more ample beat, the blood circulates faster and more powerfully than when the body is at rest. And the earth’s rhythms draw that along, they echo and respond to each other. A last source of energy, after the heart and the Earth, is landscapes. They summon the walker and make him at home: the hills, the colours, the trees all confirm it. The charm of a twisting path among hills, the beauty of vine fields in autumn, like purple and gold scarves, the silvery glitter of olive leaves against a defining summer sky, the immensity of perfectly sliced glaciers … all these things support, transport and nourish us.
”
”
Frédéric Gros (A Philosophy of Walking)
“
That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper’s images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as “our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness”...
Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.
”
”
Olivia Laing
“
O life as futile, then, as frail! / O for thy voice to soothe and bless! / What hope of answer, or redress? / Behind the veil, behind the veil …
She felt alert, somehow – perhaps awake was a better word: everything seemed clearer, as if a fog had lifted; colours were sharper, the edges of things more defined. The world no longer felt muted and grey and far away – behind a veil.
It felt alive again, and vivid, and full of colour, wet with autumn rain; and vibrating with the eternal hum of endless birth and death.
”
”
Alex Michaelides (The Maidens)
“
Every flower displays its beautiful colours in autumn.
”
”
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
“
Fall comes with different colors to challenge a green Summer
”
”
Neamat Alishiryan
“
Purple and yellow flowers in bloom as far as the can see.
The earthy, warm colours of Hokkaido in autumn.
There I am, chasing a honeybee.
”
”
Hiro Arikawa (The Travelling Cat Chronicles)
“
Autumn in the country advances in a predictable path, taking its place among the unyielding rhythms of the passing seasons. It follows the summer harvest, ushering in cooler nights, and shorter days, enveloping all of Lanark County in a spectacular riot of colour. Brilliant hues of yellow, orange and red exclaim, in no uncertain terms, that these are the trees where maple syrup legends are born.
”
”
Arlene Stafford-Wilson
“
LONG YEARNING
Long yearning,
To be in Chang'an.
The grasshoppers weave their autumn song by the golden railing of the well;
Frost coalesces on my bamboo mat, changing its colour with cold.
My lonely lamp is not bright, I’d like to end these thoughts;
I roll back the hanging, gaze at the moon, and long sigh in vain.
The beautiful person's like a flower beyond the edge of the clouds.
Above is the black night of heaven's height;
Below is the green water billowing on.
The sky is long, the road is far, bitter flies my spirit;
The spirit I dream can't get through, the mountain pass is hard.
Long yearning,
Breaks my heart.
”
”
Li Bai
“
The morning was, therefore, a mixture of a plenitude of densities, from the presence of the placid birds, to the mundane premonition, to the spring of small glisters which accompanied that autumnal rain. The music, in a simple whistle, recreated a new universe with the parish and all the hearts that were witness to it- padre, pigeons, swallows, the world!- were clothed in a new carnivalesque colouring: a celebration from within.
”
”
Ondjaki (The Whistler)
“
The maple brings tourists who come to marvel at the blazing colours of the autumn leaves and it brings cash dollars in the form of the unctuous, faintly metallic syrup that Americans like to pour all over their breakfast, on waffles and pancakes certainly, but on bacon too. Sounds alarming to English ears, but actually it is rather delicious. Like crack, crystal meth, and Chocolate HobNobs, one nibble and you're hooked for life.
”
”
Stephen Fry (Stephen Fry in America)
“
He especially liked to look at the trees and their reflections in the river. North Carolina trees are beautiful in deep autumn: greens, yellows, reds, oranges, every shade in between, their dazzling colours glowing with the sun.
”
”
Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook (The Notebook, #1))
“
Tears fall like liquid leaves
into the streams and full,
autumn-coloured rivers of our blood
And liquid leaves become crystal
in our winter fortress
before they flow
shifting, changing
rich red by grace of autumn
and fertile in the spring
”
”
Tamara Rendell (Realm of the Stag King (Lunar Fire, #1))
“
—
If love wants you; if you’ve been melted
down to stars, you will love
with lungs and gills, with warm blood
and cold. With feathers and scales.
Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy
you’ll want to breathe with the spiral
calls of birds, while your lashing tail
still gropes for the waes. You’ll try
to haul your weight from simple sea
to gravity of land. Caught by the tide,
in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments
suffocating in both water and air.
If love wants you, suddently your past is
obsolete science. Old maps,
disproved theories, a diorama.
The moment our bodies are set to spring open.
The immanence that reassembles matter
passes through us then disperses
into time and place:
the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons.
The mother who hears her child crying upstairs
and suddenly feels her dress
wet with milk.
Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog
tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew
before we were loved there,
the places left fallow when we’re born,
waiting for experience to find its way
into us. The night crossing, on deck
in the dark car. On the beach wehre
night reshaped your face.
In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet,
moss like velvet spread over splintered forms.
The instant spray freezes
in air above the falls, a gasp of ice.
We rise, hearing our names
called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon
an escutcheon on the shield of sky.
The current that passes through us, radio waves,
electric lick. The billions of photons that pass
through film emulsion every second, the single
submicroscopic crystal struck
that becomes the phograph.
We look and suddenly the world
looks back.
A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky.
—
But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate
by the rear-view mirror
of the moon; if we continue to reach
both for salt and for the sweet white
nibs of grass growing closest to earth;
if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also
driving through the canyon at night,
all around us the hidden glow of limestone
erased by darkness; if still we sish
we’d waited for morning,
we will know ourselves
nowhere.
Not in the mirrors of waves
or in the corrading stream,
not in the wavering
glass of an apartment building,
not in the looming light of night lobbies
or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen
or in the motel where we watched meteors
from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open,
turned stars to rain.
We will become
indigestible. Afraid
of choking on fur
and armour, animals
will refuse the divided longings
in our foreing blue flesh.
—
In your hands, all you’ve lost,
all you’ve touched.
In the angle of your head,
every vow and
broken vow. In your skin,
every time you were disregarded,
every time you were received.
Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field,
mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem.
The branch that’s released when the bird lifts
or lands. In a summer kitchen.
On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.
”
”
Anne Michaels
“
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something – some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature – has told him it is time to wake up ... At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at any other time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.
”
”
George Orwell (Some Thoughts on the Common Toad)
“
The visitor was about the same age as Hallgrimsson, but he looked older; certainly his face bore the marks of more experience and trial than did the professor’s smooth cheeks and unlined brow. He was a gyptian of the people of Eastern Anglia, a man called Coram van Texel, who had travelled much in the far north. He was lean, of middle height, and his movements were careful, as if he thought he might break something inadvertently, as if he were unused to delicate glasses and fine tableware. His dæmon, a large cat with fur of a thousand beautiful autumnal colours, stalked the corners of the study before leaping gracefully to Coram’s lap. Ten years after this evening, and again ten years after that, Lyra would marvel at the colouring of that dæmon’s fur
”
”
Philip Pullman (La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust, #1))
“
The trees are revealing their structures. There’s the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there’s a wide-open rose, still. Look at the colour of it.
”
”
Ali Smith (Autumn (Seasonal, #1))
“
By the time they had called at the baker's and climbed to the top of Cap Diamant, the sun, dropping with incredible quickness, had already disappeared. They sat down in the blue twilight to eat their bread and await the turbid afterglow which is peculiar to Quebec in autumn; the slow, rich, prolonged flowing-back of crimson across the sky, after the sun has sunk behind the dark ridges of the west. Because of the haze in the air the colour seems thick, like a heavy liquid, welling up wave after wave, a substance that throbs, rather than a light.
”
”
Willa Cather (Shadows on the Rock)
“
I am like a remnant of a cloud of autumn uselessly roaming in the sky, O my sun ever-glorious! Thy touch has not yet melted my vapour, making me one with thy light, and thus I count months and years separated from thee.
If this be thy wish and if this be thy play, then take this fleeting emptiness of mine, paint it with colours, gild it with gold, float it on the wanton wind and spread it in varied wonders.
And again when it shall be thy wish to end this play at night, I shall melt and vanish away in the dark, or it may be in a smile of the white morning, in a coolness of purity transparent.
”
”
Rabindranath Tagore (Gitanjali)
“
Through the summer of 1845, Miss Barrett, as usual, recovered strength, but so slightly that her doctor urged that she should not face the winter in England. Plans were accordingly made for her going abroad, to which the following letters refer, but the scheme ultimately broke down before the prohibition of Mr. Barrett — a prohibition for which no valid reason was put forward, and which, to say the least, bore the colour of unaccountable indifference to his daughter’s health and wishes. The matter is of some importance on account of its bearing on the action taken by Miss Barrett in the autumn of the following year.
”
”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
“
Outside, the trees and hedgerows were displaying the colours of autumn in a rainbow of browns, greens, yellows, golds and reds. The smoke, dust and dirt of London had been left far behind. He loved this time of year in the English countryside, when the air had a freshness, a clarity far removed from the brown fogs and clamour
”
”
M.J. Lee (The Christmas Carol (Jayne Sinclair Genealogical Mystery #6.5))
“
Many say autumn is by far the most spectacular season in Lanark County. During these brief few weeks Mother Nature paints our landscape with her most vivid palette, colouring our trees with broad strokes of the richest crimsons, fiery oranges, and the sunniest yellows, leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that these sugar maples are the crown jewels of our forests.
”
”
Arlene Stafford-Wilson (Lanark County Comfort)
“
To fill the days up of his dateless year
Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere?
For first of all the sphery signs whereby
Love severs light from darkness, and most high,
In the white front of January there glows
The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose:
And gold-eyed as the shore-flower shelterless
Whereon the sharp-breathed sea blows bitterness,
A storm-star that the seafarers of love
Strain their wind-wearied eyes for glimpses of,
Shoots keen through February's grey frost and damp
The lamplike star of Hero for a lamp;
The star that Marlowe sang into our skies
With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes;
And in clear March across the rough blue sea
The signal sapphire of Alcyone
Makes bright the blown bross of the wind-foot year;
And shining like a sunbeam-smitten tear
Full ere it fall, the fair next sign in sight
Burns opal-wise with April-coloured light
When air is quick with song and rain and flame,
My birth-month star that in love's heaven hath name
Iseult, a light of blossom and beam and shower,
My singing sign that makes the song-tree flower;
Next like a pale and burning pearl beyond
The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond
Signs the sweet head of Maytime; and for June
Flares like an angered and storm-reddening moon
Her signal sphere, whose Carthaginian pyre
Shadowed her traitor's flying sail with fire;
Next, glittering as the wine-bright jacinth-stone,
A star south-risen that first to music shone,
The keen girl-star of golden Juliet bears
Light northward to the month whose forehead wears
Her name for flower upon it, and his trees
Mix their deep English song with Veronese;
And like an awful sovereign chrysolite
Burning, the supreme fire that blinds the night,
The hot gold head of Venus kissed by Mars,
A sun-flower among small sphered flowers of stars,
The light of Cleopatra fills and burns
The hollow of heaven whence ardent August yearns;
And fixed and shining as the sister-shed
Sweet tears for Phaethon disorbed and dead,
The pale bright autumn's amber-coloured sphere,
That through September sees the saddening year
As love sees change through sorrow, hath to name
Francesca's; and the star that watches flame
The embers of the harvest overgone
Is Thisbe's, slain of love in Babylon,
Set in the golden girdle of sweet signs
A blood-bright ruby; last save one light shines
An eastern wonder of sphery chrysopras,
The star that made men mad, Angelica's;
And latest named and lordliest, with a sound
Of swords and harps in heaven that ring it round,
Last love-light and last love-song of the year's,
Gleams like a glorious emerald Guenevere's.
”
”
Algernon Charles Swinburne (Tristram of Lyonesse: And Other Poems)
“
Outside november night gathers
With a harmony of autumn leaves
Blown down a wind.
Quietly by the fire Taliesin
Humming from within his closing hood
Places the seeing child on to a chair.
And the glowing head is clothed
In a vestment with bright
Colours spreading.
Together two voices rise
Until at the end of breath one soars
And one falls away......echoing.
- Circle of Gold
”
”
John Fairfax (Adrift on the Star Brow of Taliesin)
“
was virtually certain of that. As the coach drew into St. Giles’, the sky was an open blue, and the sunlight gleamed on the cinnamon-coloured stone along the broad tree-lined avenue. “Here we are, in St. Giles.’ ” (Ashenden slipped into over-drive now.) “You can see the plane trees on either side of us, ablaze with the beautifully golden tints of autumn—and, on the left here, St. John’s College—and Balliol just beyond. And here in front of us, the famous Martyrs’ Memorial, modelled on the Eleanor Crosses of Edward the First, and designed by Gilbert Scott to honour the great Protestant martyrs—Cranmer and Latimer and, er …” “Nicholas Ridley,” supplied Mrs. Roscoe, as the coach turned right at the traffic lights and almost immediately pulled in on the left of Beaumont Street beneath the tall neo-Gothic façade of The Randolph Hotel. “At last!” cried Laura Stratton, with what might have been
”
”
Colin Dexter (The Jewel That Was Ours (Inspector Morse, #9))
“
That’s why you need to go to collage, Daniel said. You’re using the wrong word, Elisabeth said. The word you’re using is for when you cut out pictures of things or coloured shapes and stick them on paper. I disagree, Daniel said. Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown up into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange.
”
”
Ali Smith (Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1))
“
Winter came to the island gently as a rule. The sky was still clear, the sea blue and calm, and the sun warm. But there would be an uncertainty in the air. The gold and scarlet leaves that littered the countryside in great drifts wispered and chuckled among themselves, or took experimental runs from place to place, rolling like coloured hoops among the trees. It was if they were practising something, preparing for something, and they would discuss it excitedly in rustly voices as they crowded round the treetrunks.
”
”
Gerald Durrell (My Family and Other Animals (Corfu Trilogy, #1))
“
It was a sad story, and nothing like the paintings, which were so witty and joyous and full of unexpected colour and juxtapositions that Elisabeth, flicking through the catalogue, realized that she was smiling. The painter’s last painting had been of a huge and beautiful female arse, nothing else, famed by a jovial proscenium arch like it was filling the whole stage of a theatre. Underneath, in bright red, was a word in huge and rambunctious looking capitals.
BUM.
Elisabeth laughed out loud.
What a way to go.
”
”
Ali Smith (Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1))
“
One late-autumn day I opened the back door to fetch some water, and there was a young hare sat on my back step. Save for the twitching of its nose, it froze in position as if I had surprised it as it was about to knock. It was already the size of a full-grown rabbit, and its black-tipped ears were longer than any rabbit’s would ever be. I stood there and waited for it to flush. After a while I began to doubt that it would, and squatted down to its level for a closer look, eye to eye. It stared at me apparently unconcerned, chewing silently, with bulging eyes that were such a rich golden colour they were almost orange, with black depths like the keyhole of a door to another world.
”
”
Neil Ansell (Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills)
“
An autumn evening...
An autumn evening, I ran hurriedly,
made my way I did to that special bench in the park,
Where in a likewise special week,
I used to meet my Amily.
My dear Amily with her mischievious eyes,
Hear songs do my ears, whenever she speaks.
With her fragrance and aura of jasmine,
Feel I do that I am in heaven.
Words spoken between us are of course less,
but the thoughts that we share are, a lot.
See each other we do, very less.
Yet an urge to keep seeing each other, we have got.
As I sat on the bench today, waiting for her,
I wondered how today she would be.
Would she dress grand or just come casually,
in a simple manner and her hair let out freely.
After a while, glance I did at the time.
“Why hadn't she come by now?”
Did she meet with trouble on the way that she came?
Or didn't it cross her mind what the time was now?
Then my worries were put to rest,
When I saw her in front of me.
I smiled at the way, that she had dressed for me.
Wearing a dress of my favourite colour,
and herself appearing royal with grandeur,
she came slowly towards me, with doubt in her eyes,
as her eyes enquired if she looked good that way?
I smiled again and gestured that she looked like a princess.
Then I offered my hand, to walk the rest of the day.
So holding each other's hands,
we walked gently,
with our minds out of the world and lost in our own dreams;
Just the two of us, me and my Amily.
”
”
Yasir Sulaiman (3 Stories of Love: Romance isn't always sweet)
“
I feel you calling, in the autumn sweet transformation.
I have reached my brightest green to the gold burning sun.
I have folded my colours into the wind,
bright colours taken to the sky.
My silk has gone to moisture in the rising atmosphere
and I am your colours again, deep and warm.
I hear your calling and I answer,
I come back to you, to slip inside the dark.
Will I be found by the decaying things?
Will I be found by the roots and drunk by tree and flower?
Will I slip and mingle and roll along,
find my way to a river and with it dance,
and give myself in a sigh to the ocean?
Will I scatter, a few fragments of sand –
my body to glisten beneath a caress of moonlight
as I make my way towards no more
as I find my way to forever
”
”
Tamara Rendell (Mystical Tides)
“
wedding rings’, a safe adventure that united all newcomers. These were young families no longer fearful of getting into debt: avid consumers since they possessed almost nothing; children of poor Irish, Italian, Jewish and other immigrants convinced that all their dreams for the future were about to come true. Levittown and communities like it nurtured a social change that was to turn traditional America on its head: the start of the move to the suburbs, the end of the old city and the old countryside. Another beginning, an elderly American once told me, was the advent of new cars. For him it all started with the cars, or rather their colours. He traced it back to the autumn of 1954, when he noticed people thronging in front of local car showrooms. Something extraordinary was
”
”
Geert Mak (In America: Travels with John Steinbeck)
“
You’ve never seen the island as it looks now, tipping over into autumn. There are no bright colours out here to signal departure, they are simply erased, a withered tangle of greys and browns, the island shrinks and is somehow absorbed into the rain and sea and the evenings are dramatic with their desolate sunsets and banks of cloud. The darkness on an island such as this is like standing at the end of the world and all the night sounds are intensified, giving an impression of utter solitude – nature no longer frames one’s existence, but hurls it to the periphery and imposes its sovereign domination. Suddenly it’s just the sea and vast, dramatic autumn skies. Oddly enough I feel less and less inclined to leave, the less benign my surroundings grow – the security of town is more menacing.
”
”
Tove Jansson (Letters from Tove)
“
Beyond doubt, I am a splendid fellow. In the autumn, winter and spring, I execute the duties of a student of divinity; in the summer I disguise myself in my skin and become a lifeguard. My slightly narrow and gingerly hirsute but not necessarily unmanly chest becomes brown. My smooth back turns the colour of caramel, which, in conjunction with the whipped cream of my white pith helmet, gives me, some of my teenage satellites assure me, a delightfully edible appearance. My legs, which I myself can study, cocked as they are before me while I repose on my elevated wooden throne, are dyed a lustreless maple walnut that accentuates their articulate strength. Correspondingly, the hairs of my body are bleached blond, so that my legs have the pointed elegance of, within the flower, umber anthers dusted with pollen.
”
”
John Updike (Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories)
“
He had grown up among people to whom such emotions were unknown. The old Marquess's passion for his fields and woods was the love of the agriculturist and the hunter, not that of the naturalist or the poet; and the aristocracy of the cities regarded the country merely as so much soil from which to draw their maintenance. The gentlefolk never absented themselves from town but for a few weeks of autumn, when they went to their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo's tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting Countess
”
”
Edith Wharton (Edith Wharton: Collection of 115 Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated) (Annotated Classics))
“
The days that pass, which turn into the time that passes, are neither lovely nor hideous, but always the same. Perhaps it rains for a few seconds sometimes, or the four-o'clock sun holds time back for a few minutes like rearing horses. Perhaps the past doesn't always preserve the beautiful order that clocks give to the present, and perhaps the future is rushing up in disorder, each moment tripping over itself, to be the first to slice itself up. And perhaps there is a charm or horror, grace or abjection, in the convulsive movements of what is going to be and of what has been. But Valentin had never taken any pleasure in these suppositions. He still didn't know enough about the subject. He wanted to be content with an identity nicely chopped into pieces of varying lengths, but whose character was always similar, without dyeing it in autumnal colours, drenching it in April showers or mottling it with the instability of clouds.
”
”
Raymond Queneau (The Sunday of Life)
“
One of the special delights of my childhood was to go and see the cases of illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum, and to walk, as every child can, right into their pages--losing myself in an enchanted world of gold, landscapes and skies whose colours were indwelt with light as if their sun shone not above but in them. Most marvelous of all were the many manuscripts mysteriously entitled "Book of Hours", since I did not know how one kept hours in a book. Their title-pages and richly ornamented initials showed scenes of times and seasons--ploughing in springtime, formal gardens bright in summer with heraldic roses, autumn harvesting, and logging in winter snow under clear, cold skies seen through a filigree screen of black trees. I could only assume that these books were some ancient device for marking the passage of time and they associated themselves in my mind with sundials in old country yards upon hot afternoons, with the whirring and booming of clocks in towers, with astrolabes engraved with the mysterious signs of the Zodiac, and-above all-with the slow, cyclic sweep of the sun, moon and stars over my head.
”
”
Alan W. Watts
“
It was around six in the evening, and light the colour of opal, pierced by the golden rays of the autumn sun, spread over a bluish sea. The heat of the day had gradually expired and one was starting to feel that light breeze which seems like the breath of nature awaking after the burning midday siesta: that delicious breath that cools the Mediterranean coast and carries the scent of trees from shore to shore, mingled with the acrid scent of the sea. Over the huge lake that extends from Gibraltar to the Dardanelles and from Tunis to Venice, a light yacht, cleanly and elegantly shaped, was slipping through the first mists of evening. Its movement was that of a swan opening its wings to the wind and appearing to glide across the water. At once swift and graceful, it advanced, leaving behind a phosphorescent wake. Bit by bit, the sun, whose last rays we were describing, fell below the western horizon; but, as though confirming the brilliant fantasies of mythology, its prying flames reappeared at the crest of every wave as if to reveal that the god of fire had just hidden his face in the bosom of Amphitrite, who tried in vain to hide her lover in the folds of her azure robe.
”
”
Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
“
As the season changed to autumn and the air turned crisp, we took out our cosy sweaters, snuggled in warm blankets, and found comfort in the little things like warm drinks. While we watched the leaves change their colour from green to yellow, bright orange or red, we came to realize that it was also the right time for us to make a change in our life, to make a new beginning.
It has been a different kind of year. Things have changed around here, the circumstances we found ourselves in were like a restless wave. A sudden storm came on, producing wind and hail, changing the rule of the game. From one day to the next, there was little room for manoeuvre left. Where was the fun in that, we wondered.
Things just didn’t go well and the situation was getting harder. We could sense along the way that it was time to let go of something that no longer served us. Our instincts told us that the time has come to turn the page, to allow new things to happen and think new thoughts. At first, it was hard to admit that there was no way around it of letting go because we fell in a comfort zone and getting out of it can be uncomfortable. We didn’t want to leave a place that was so familiar to us. New beginnings can be scary. But luckily, the autumn season taught us that change can be beautiful.
”
”
Surya Raj
“
Why the Leaves Change Colour
The first girl who was ever born with amber skin was Mother Nature’s own child.
Her birth was from a seed Mother Nature planted in the darkest, purest, most
fertile soil, and soon there was a flower, and the flower opened up to show the
most beautiful little girl imaginable.
One day when the little girl was playing, the Sky, who was her brother, jealous of
how lovely she was and how happy and distracted their mother had been since she
was born, stole her and placed her upon a star so far away from the earth, Mother
Nature could not get to her.
In her grief, Mother Nature took every leaf that existed on Earth and turned them
amber.
The baby girl raised herself on this star—after all, she was her mother’s child,
fortitude became her. She became majestic, and independent, and knew how to
cope with anything alone because she had always only known alone. When the girl
was finally old enough to explore the universe by itself, she travelled across the
stars, finding beauty in thousands of planets, but none where she really felt at
home. Until, that is, she came upon a beautiful blue planet with amber leaves.
Walking through golden leaves, she remembered who she was, and who her
mother was, for this is the magic of the bond children have with their mothers.
They will remember them even if they are millions of miles away; why do you
think good mothers can say things like ‘I love you all the way around the universe’
and you just know they mean it and know not to question it?
When Mother Nature felt in her bones that her child had returned, she took her into
her arms and turned all the leaves to green again. But because the leaves of amber
gold were how her girl found her again, it happens every single year in
commemoration. We call it a season. We named it after Mother Nature’s only
daughter. We called it Autumn.
”
”
Nikita Gill (Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul)
“
It is easy for the student to feel that with all his labour he is collecting only a few leaves, many of them now torn or decayed, from the countless foliage of the Tree of Tales, with which the Forest of Days is carpeted. It seems vain to add to the litter. Who can design a new leaf? The patterns from bud to unfolding, and the colours from spring to autumn were all discovered by men long ago. But that is not true. The seed of the tree can be replanted in almost any soil, even in one so smoke-ridden (as Lang said) as that of England. Spring is, of course, not really less beautiful because we have seen or heard of other like events: like events, never from world's beginning to world's end the same event. Each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year may be the embodiment, the first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless generations of men.
We do not, or need not, despair of drawing because all lines must be either curved or straight, nor of painting because there are only three 'primary' colours. We may indeed be older now, in so far as we are heirs in enjoyment or in practice of many generations of ancestors in the arts. In this inheritance of wealth there may be a danger of boredom or of anxiety to be original, and that may lead to a distaste for fine drawing, delicate pattern, and 'pretty' colours, or else to mere manipulation and over-elaboration of old material, clever and heartless. But the true road of escape from such weariness is not to be found in the willfully awkward, clumsy, or misshapen, not in making all things dark or unremittingly violent; nor in the mixing of colours on through subtlety to drabness, and the fantastical complication of shapes to the point of silliness and on towards delirium. Before we reach such states we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses – and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish.
”
”
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays)
“
Childhood is supposed to be a radiant springtime but mine seems to have been always autumn, the gales seething in the big beeches behind this old gate-lodge, as they’re doing right now, and the rooks above them wheeling haphazard, like scraps of char from a bonfire, and a custard-coloured gleam having its last go low down in the western sky.
”
”
John Banville
“
Autumn
Autumn: the year breathes dully towards its death,
beside its dying sacrificial fire;
the dim world's middle-age of vain desire
is strangely troubled, waiting for the breath
that speaks the winter's welcome malison
to fix it in the unremembering sleep:
the silent woods brood o'er an anxious deep,
and in the faded sorrow of the sun,
I see my dreams' dead colours, one by one,
forth-conjur'd from their smouldering palaces,
fade slowly with the sigh of the passing year.
They wander not nor wring their hands nor weep,
discrown'd belated dreams! but in the drear
and lingering world we sit among the trees
and bow our heads as they, with frozen mouth,
looking, in ashen reverie, towards the clear
sad splendour of the winter of the far south.
Christopher John Brennan
”
”
Christopher Brennan
“
But life is beautiful, Sariel!’ Gabriel said, trying to convince him. ‘Watch the sunrise sometime lying in the scented flowers of the field, or the shooting stars at the end of summer! Read a couple of really exciting books or lose yourself in the unselfconscious smiles of children. Have a swim in a clear mountain lake or take a run among trees clothed in autumn colours. If you can see the good in Earth, your own existence will become the richer for it!’
‘That all sounds very well and good, but you haven’t convinced me,’ the deep-voiced angel murmured and Ariel laughed.
‘My friend, Gabriel was very gently trying to suggest that you should fall in love and that will better dispose you to the world!
”
”
A.O. Esther (Breath of Darkness (Shattered Glories, #4))
“
It was already late afternoon when Junker Hinrich rapidly descended the heathland path; but the more clearly the distant turreted lodge loomed up before him the slower became his pace. Its upper storey rose above the high wall that surrounded its courtyard, a wall built as protection against roaming beasts of prey, and its red gateway gleamed a long way off in the autumn sun. The heathland blooms had faded, but in their place the leaves of the oaks surrounding the building had already produced their bright colours. An intense silence reigned; the branches that stretched over the roof lay motionless on its dark brown pantiles.
”
”
Theodor Storm (Zur Chronik von Grieshuus (German Edition))
“
Autumn colours are my favourite. It’s like the world is doing a farewell dance before winter takes its breath. One final explosion, a celebration of life before the world turns grey.
”
”
Jade West (Teach Me Dirty)
“
I eased open the door. The room was similar to mine in shape, but was bedecked in hues or orange and red and gold, with faint traces of green and brown. Like being in an autumn wood. But while my room was all softness and grace, his was marked with ruggedness. In lieu of a pretty breakfast table by the window, a worm worktable dominated the space, covered in various weapons. It was there he sat, wearing only a white shirt and trousers, his red hair unbound and gleaming like liquid fire. Tamlin's court-trained emissary, but a warrior in his own right.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
“
I eased open the door. The room was similar to mine in shape, but was bedecked in hues or orange and red and gold, with faint traces of green and brown. Like being in an autumn wood. But while my room was all softness and grace, his was marked with ruggedness. In lieu of a pretty breakfast table by the window, a worn worktable dominated the space, covered in various weapons. It was there he sat, wearing only a white shirt and trousers, his red hair unbound and gleaming like liquid fire. Tamlin's court-trained emissary, but a warrior in his own right.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
“
It was almost November and the leaves were starting to fall - before the war, she'd loved the autumn colours, going for a walk with a nip in the air. But now it meant that the soldiers would be covered in mud, suffering frostbite, more at risk of developing horrible infection, all of it adding to their misery. As the leaves drifted down, it made her feel sad, mournful, the seasons were still turning and the menace of war seemed unstoppable
”
”
Kate Eastham (The Sea Nurses)
“
The garden which lay around it would be a lady water-colourist’s heaven, herbaceous borders, rockeries, and water-gardens were carried to a perfection of vulgarity, and flaunted a riot of huge and hideous flowers, each individual bloom appearing twice as large, three times as brilliant as it ought to have been and if possible of a different colour from that which nature intended. It would be hard to say whether it was more frightful, more like glorious Technicolor, in spring, in summer, or in autumn. Only in the depth of winter, covered by the kindly snow, did it melt into the landscape and become tolerable
”
”
Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love)
“
Sweetly the summer air came up to the tumulus, the grass sighed softly, the butterflies went by, sometimes alighting on the green dome. Two thousand years! Summer after summer the blue butterflies had visited the mound, the thyme had flowered, the wind sighed in the grass. The azure morning had spread its arms over the low tomb; and full glowing noon burned on it; the purple of sunset rosied the sward. Stars, ruddy in the vapour of the southern horizon, beamed at midnight through the mystic summer night, which is dusky and yet full of light. White mists swept up and hid it; dews rested on the turf; tender harebells drooped; the wings of the finches fanned the air—finches whose colours faded from the wings how many centuries ago! Brown autumn dwelt in the woods beneath; the rime of winter whitened the beech clump on the ridge; again the buds came on the wind-blown hawthorn bushes, and in the evening the broad constellation of Orion covered the east. Two thousand times! Two thousand times the woods grew green, and ring-doves built their nests. Day and night for two thousand years—light and shadow sweeping over the mound—two thousand years of labour by day and slumber by night. Mystery gleaming in the stars, pouring down in the sunshine, speaking in the night, the wonder of the sun and of far space, for twenty centuries round about this low and green-grown dome. Yet all that mystery and wonder is as nothing to the Thought that lies therein, to the spirit that I feel so close.
”
”
Richard Jefferies (The Story of My Heart: As Rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams)
“
But in spite of the stones it was marvellous to be working up on the Pian del Sotto: going out on to it while the morning star was still shining brilliantly in a sky that was the colour of blue-black ink; seeing the sun coming up behind Bismantova, below and far away, first illuminating the forest on the mountainside above, then flooding the plateau; sometimes rising behind dark clouds and then shining red through a hole in one of them, as if someone had opened the door of a furnace. And I liked being there when the sun was high overhead and torn white and grey clouds were racing over the mountain top from the west casting dark shadows on the pale fields, and hordes of starlings would swoop over them, and high over everything a goshawk as pale as the clouds and with wing-tips as ragged-looking as they were, soared on the wind which sighed in the trees like the wind in the rigging of a sailing-ship. And I liked it, too, when the sun had gone behind the mountain and everything on the plateau was in shadow and there was a smoky blueness in the woods which were still so green in the sunlight that it was difficult to believe that autumn had come and was well advanced.
”
”
Eric Newby (Love and War in the Apennines)
“
God has designed the world in a way that illustrates 'yet'; the green leaves lose their colour, but reveal one true colour that's been there all along.
”
”
Rachael Newham (And Yet: Finding Joy in Lament)
“
I'd painted nearly every surface in the main room.
And not with just broad swaths of colour, but with decorations- little images. Some were basic: colours of icicles drooping down the sides of the threshold. They melted into the first shoots of spring, then burst into full blooms of summer, before brightening and deepening into fall leaves. I'd painted a ring of flowers round the card table by the window, leaves and crackling flames around the dining table.
But in between the intricate decorations, I'd painted them. Bits and pieces of Mor, and Cassian, and Azriel, and Amren... and Rhys.
Mor went up to the large hearth, where I'd painted the mantel in black shimmering with veins of gold and red. Up close, it was a solid pretty bit of paint. But from the couch... 'Illyrian wings,' she said. 'Ugh, they'll never stop gloating about it.'
But she went to the window, which I'd framed in tumbling strands of gold and brass and bronze. Mor fingered her hair, cocking her head. 'Nice,' she said, surveying the room again.
Her eyes fell on the open threshold to the bedroom hallway, and she grimaced. 'Why,' she said, 'are Amren's eyes there?'
Indeed, right above the door, in the centre of the archway, I'd painted a pair of glowing silver eyes. 'Because she's always watching.'
Mor snorted. 'That simply won't do. Paint my eyes next to hers. So the males of this family will know we're both watching them the next time they come up here to get drunk for a week straight.'
'They do that?'
They used to.' Before Amarantha. 'Every autumn, the three of them would lock themselves in this house for five days and drink and drink and hunt and hunt, and they'd come back to Velaris looking halfway to death but grinning like fools. It warms my heart to know that from now on, they'll have to do it with me and Amren staring at them.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2))
“
She found the alder and ash trees breathtaking. The maple and birch a life force all their own, dripping with colour. Agatha kept them in perpetual Autumn, and, on occasion, she let Winter befall them as well. Greenery simply did not suit her as it did Sorscha and Seleste.
”
”
J.L. Vampa (Autumn of the Grimoire)
“
She'd found a smutty novel she'd already read and loved in one of the trunks Elain had packed, and had laid it on the desk.
She'd said to the air, 'I found this for you. It's a present.' The book had vanished into nothing. But in the morning, she'd found a bouquet of autumnal flowers upon her desk, the glass vase bursting with asters and chrysanthemums of every colour.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #4))
“
The shabby brown changpao is an odd choice for a deity, but an immediate tell that he's one of the dragon kings. They are easy enough to tell apart in their true dragon forms because of their colour:
East is azure, the coming of spring, South is bright red, a warm summer's kiss. White is the west, autumn's cool mist. Black is true north, a wintry king.
”
”
A.Y. Chao (Shanghai Immortal (Shanghai Immortal, #1))
“
Autumn was the best season, she thought. Fine weather, beautiful colours, but also a season of change, of fresh starts.
”
”
C.P. Ward (Autumn in Sycamore Park (The Warm Days of Autumn, #1))
“
Autumn flaunts proudly its many colours. That’s my idea of Trooping the Colour.
”
”
Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
“
The leaves of the trees are all turning gold, as though someone has brought in a paintbrush with only one colour and streaked it across the landscape.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1))
“
Like no other season, autumn flaunts proudly its many colours. That’s my idea of Trooping the Colour.
”
”
Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
“
Autumn has come, bringing its blood-drop berries, its acorns and walnuts, its spiders' webs. The sap is falling, as the trees draw their nutrients back inside, readying themselves for their long, enchanted sleep, whilst their leaves--- which in their youth were simply green--- each seem to become unique, in their last hours: blotched, spotted, blush-tipped, pocked, crinkled; the colors of gingerbread, bearskin, pumpkin, ram's fur, porridge, a bloodstained key.
”
”
Clare Pollard (The Modern Fairies)
“
I think death brushes up against nearly everyone at some point or another, but it’s properly danced with me. Grabbed me by the hand, spun me, dipped me . . . taught me to waltz. I knew life through the prism of loss, secretly at first, but now it’s coloured my world. It’s the summertime here at the minute, but I’m terrified of the autumn because then death is everywhere. And it masks itself in colours all bright, but it’s still a season of dying
”
”
Jessa Hastings (Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark (Magnolia Parks Universe, #5))
“
Your feelings
In a place where there is nothing to seek,
Where your scent is the only worth pursuing streak,
Of memories, of feelings, of old times, of you and me,
A place where there is nothing to seek, yet you can be and I can be,
A wandering feeling roaming the vastness of this emotion,
Where everything is held intact by your memories and their notion,
And in this feeling I lie wrapped within your warm feelings,
As the emotion grows intense, I then am reduced to nothing, but just a scent of your feelings,
It is a beautiful place, that is calm and too quiet,
The same place, where we had held hands and walked and met,
Not somebody, but each other, you and me,
But now the quiet looms all over, there is just the memories, the feelings, all still alive within me,
I often walk in this wilderness of emotions and memories,
And I feel questioned by the rustling leaves of the autumn trees,
As if they seek your whereabouts in me, in my eyes, in my gestures,
But all my memories are signatures of our moments of togetherness, experienced in the vastness of the life’s pastures,
Where today many flowers bloom everywhere,
They all bear your scent, your colours, but you are nowhere,
However, these flowers last forever, and thus they feed my relentless wanderings,
And there my love Irma you somehow appear everywhere, and I repose occupied by your wonderings!
”
”
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
“
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! Thy mists, that roll and rise! Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff! World, World, I cannot get thee close enough! Long have I known a glory in it all, But never knew I this; Here such a passion is As stretcheth me apart, – Lord, I do fear Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year; My soul is all but out of me, – let fall No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
”
”
Rudolph Amsel (The Best of Poetry: Thoughts that Breathe and Words that Burn: In Two Hundred Poems)
“
Just imagine you just went for a brisk walk, on a crisp autumn day. The leaves are beginning to change colour and there's freshness in the air. How do you feel when you return to your nice warm house and have a hot drink? Feels pretty good, right? That is very hygge. You just feel good all over. So
”
”
Sofie Pedersen (Keep Calm & Hygge: A Guide to The Danish Art of Simple & Cosy Living)
“
She crossed herself and gazed at the windows, shedding rainbow colours on the chapel's stone floor. The light from these windows shone just the same as it had when Harry was alive; that had not changed. And she must go on the same too, unchanging, for even when the sun did not shine the colours in the glass still existed.
”
”
Elizabeth Chadwick (The Autumn Throne (Eleanor of Aquitaine, #3))