23 Fall and Autumn Quotes

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

John Muir, “Our National Parks,” 1901

“Even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn.”

Elizabeth Lawrence (1904-1985),  American Garden Writer

“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, Letter to Maria Lewis, 1841

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonize.”

George Eliot, Letter to Maria Lewis, 1841

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn—that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness—that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”

Jane Austen, “Persuasion,” 1817

“There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 1816

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.”

Emily Bronte, “Fall, Leaves, Fall,” 1921

“As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.”

Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo Van Gogh, 1888

“Autumn mornings: sunshine and crisp air, birds and calmness, year’s end and day’s beginnings.”

Terri Guillemets, “Spectral Harmonies,”  2010

“The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn. I started going for long lone country walks among the spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end, giving myself up to the earth-scents and the sky-winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul.”

Monica Baldwin, “I Leap Over the Wall:  A Return to the World after Twenty-eight Years in a Convent,” 1949

“I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Autumn” From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 1892

“Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer’s loss
 Seems little, dear! on days like these!”

Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), excerpt from  “Autumnal,” The Poems and Prose  of  Ernest Dowson

“The time of the falling leaves has come again. Once more in our morning walk we tread upon carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and bronze, woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate textures while we slept.”

John Burroughs, “The Falling Leaves,” Under the Maples, 1921

“The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air – a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.”

Neil Gaiman, “Stardust,” 1999

“October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or shutting a book, did not end the tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: “It is simply a matter,” he explained to April, “of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.”

Neil Gaiman, “The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists,” 1994

“There is no better time than the autumn to begin forgetting the things that trouble us, allowing them to fall away like dried leaves. There is no better time to dance again, to make the most of every crumb of sunlight and warm body and soul with its rays before it falls asleep and becomes only a dim light bulb in the skies.”

Paulo Coelho, “Adultery,” 2014

“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”

Stephen King, “Salem’s Lot,” 1975

“It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.”

Diana Gabaldon, “Outlander,” 1991