12 Literary Quotes That Capture the Beauty of September
Writers have a long history of romanticizing September.
A waiting room between seasons, a soft and wistful period of transition, September has a softer and more introspective quality than the months directly preceding and following it. The lush excess of August is just as dramatic as the burnished melancholy of October, but in September, the leaves aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves.
The changing of the calendar at this time of year can sometimes feel like another January, and perhaps it’s a more natural place to mark the beginning of the academic year thanks to the autumn equinox, which falls every year around September 21.
September is a threshold. Here are some quotes that honor what is arguably one of the most romantic months in literature.
- “This is autumn’s great Departure Gate / and everyone, boarding passes in hand, waits patiently in a long, long line.” — Barbara Crooker, “And Now It’s September”
- “Sand blew up in curtains on the sidewalks, and the merry-go-round was hidden with canvas, all of the horses frozen in mid-air on their brass poles, showing teeth, galloping on. With only the wind for music, slipping through canvas.” — Ray Bradbury, “The Lake,” The October Country
- “The fragrance of the breeze, the tone of the light, the presence of tiny flowers in the grass, the sweet reverberations that accompanied sounds; all these had told me that autumn had come again, increasing the distance between me and the dead with each cycle of the seasons.” — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
- “With what a glory comes and goes the year!” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Autumn”
- “Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different.” — Zadie Smith, On Beauty
- “At no other time 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, Letters on Cézanne
- “The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the air poised. The dark night into which the year was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening, a new and necessary austerity, the sparer climate for which I longed. The shed trees were brittle and still, the creek light and cold, and my spirit holding its breath.” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
- “Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow.” — Donna Tartt, The Secret History
- “All of the months are crude experiments, out of which the perfect September is made.” — Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909
- “That old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.” ― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
- “Confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.” ― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?” ― Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City