12 Literary Quotes That Are Love Letters to October
What is October if not proof that endings can be beautiful? Days grow longer, life moves more slowly, and the world is painted in a fresh palette of blazing colors. This short, fleeting season, the sweet interlude between the golden days of summer and the darkness of winter, has inspired countless poems and works of literature that
It makes sense that writers have found a particular connection with autumn. The season calls for a certain interiority, inviting us to spend more time indoors and engage with our own thoughts.
It has been said that beauty captures the mind and soul specifically because it doesn’t last forever. October is regarded with such reverence because it’s temporal. It sparks a sense of divine longing. Many, many writers have thoughtfully expressed this.
Here is a collection of love letters to October that capture the feeling we all know and wait all year for.
- “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” – Albert Camus
- “I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks
- “By this autumn fire God every year purges the floor of nature. All effete substances that have served their purpose in the old form are burnt up. Everywhere God makes sweet and clean the earth with fire.” – Hugh Macmillan
- “Autumn repays the earth the leaves which summer lent it.” – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- “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 Elliot
- “We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we’ve stashed away. But there are times when we’re all autumn people.” – Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
- “[H]ow can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?” – John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
- “Another year gone, leaving everywhere / its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves, / the uneaten fruits crumbling damply / in the shadows, unmattering back / from the particular island / of this summer…” – Mary Oliver, “Fall Song,” American Primitive
- “Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I’d never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty.” – Donna Tartt, The Secret History
- “The grave and golden autumns find God’s contemplative beauty, closer, nearer.” – Marya Zaturenska, “Homage to Christina Rosetti,” Collected Poems
- “… autumn with its bottles of blood and gold had everybody’s attention.” – Toni Morrison, Beloved