These fall quotes will help you appreciate the end of summer.
Spring and summer are a time of sowing and hard work. Fall is a season of reaping the harvest.
As the temperature cools and the bugs die, fall reminds us that all summers must end. But also, that change can be beautiful.
Inspirational Fall Quotes
“Even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn.”
~Elizabeth Lawrence
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
~Albert Camus
“And the sun took a step back, the leaves lulled themselves to sleep, and autumn was awakened.”
~Raquel Franco
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Autumn in New York, why does it seem so inviting? Autumn in New York, it spells the thrill of first-nighting.”
~Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
“Winter is an etching, Spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting, and autumn a mosaic of them all.”
~Stanley Horowitz
“Falling autumn leaves gave the air an amber hue as though seen through a jar of honey.”
~Paula Wall
“The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.”
~William Shakespeare
“Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.”
~Yoko Ono
“It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.”
~Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost
“To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.”
~William Shakespeare
“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
“Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”
~Nora Ephron
“October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!”
~Rainbow Rowell , Attachments
“At no other time (than autumn) 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
“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
“On the day the tree bloomed in the fall, when its white apple blossoms fell and covered the ground like snow, it was tradition for the Waverleys to gather in the garden like survivors of some great catastrophe, hugging one another, laughing as they touched faces and arms, making sure they were all okay, grateful to have gotten through it.”
~Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost
“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
~Ray Bradbury
“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. 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.”
[Letter to Miss Lewis, Oct. 1, 1841]”
~George Eliot, George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals
“Some of Bay’s fondest memories were of lying under the apple tree in the summer while Claire gardened and the apple tree tossed apples at her like a dog trying to coax its owner into playing catch.”
~Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost
“[T]hat 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
“AUTUMNAL
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.Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time’s deceit.Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees.”~Ernest Dowson, The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson
“I was drinking in the surroundings: air so crisp you could snap it with your fingers and greens in every lush shade imaginable offset by autumnal flashes of red and yellow.”
~Wendy Delsol, Stork
“Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable…the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street…by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.”
~Hal Borland
“Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly. They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar.”
~Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
“The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.”
~Jane Hirshfield, The Heat of Autumn
“Go, sit upon the lofty hill, And turn your eyes around, Where waving woods and waters wild Do hymn an autumn sound. The summer sun is faint on them— The summer flowers depart— Sit still— as all transform’d to stone, Except your musing heart.”
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Autumn
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves…”
~Virginia Woolf
“A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.”
~E.E. Cummings
“Another fall, another turned page…”
~Wallace Stegner
“Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go.”
~Unknown
“Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.”
~Rémy de Gourmon
“Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground.”
~Andrea Gibson
“For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.”
~Hal Borland
“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
~L.M. Montgomery
“I hope I can be the autumn leaf, who looked at the sky and lived. And when it was time to leave, gracefully it knew life was a gift.”
~Dodinsky
“The heart of autumn must have broken here, and poured its treasure upon the leaves.”
~Charlotte Bates
“If a year was tucked inside of a clock, then autumn would be the magic hour.”
~Victoria Erickson
“Autumn is the season to find contentment at home by paying attention to what we already have.”
~Unknown
“Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable…the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street…by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.”
~Hal Borland
“I can smell autumn dancing in the breeze. The sweet chill of pumpkin, and crisp sunburnt leaves.”
~Ann Drake
“How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.”
~John Burroughs
“Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”
~Samuel Butler
“Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.”
~Jim Bishop
“Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn.”
~Elizabeth Lawrence
“October’s poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter.”
~Nova S. Blair
“…I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”
~Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Dancing of the autumn laves on a surface of a lake is a dream we see when we are awake.”
~Mehmet Murat Ildan
“Autumn that year painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron, and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under the harvest skies.”
~Sharon Kay Penman
“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
“I loved autumn, the season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it.”
~Lee Maynard
“A fallen leaf is nothing more than a summer’s wave goodbye.”
~Unknown
“Anyone who thinks fallen leaves are dead has never watched them dancing on a windy day.”
~Shira Tamir
“The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let the dead things go.”
~Unknown
“Wild is the music of the autumnal winds amongst the faded woods.”
~William Wordsworth
“Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.”
~Lauren DeStefano
“Autumn mornings: sunshine and crisp air, birds and calmness, year’s end and day’s beginnings.”
~Terri Guillemets
“Autumn leaves are falling, filling up the streets; golden colors on the lawn, nature’s trick or treat!”
~Rusty Fischer
“The tints of autumn…a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.”
~John Greenleaf Whittier
“There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.”
~Joe L. Wheeler
“There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been.”
~Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, we have had our summer evenings, now for October eves.”
~Humbert Wolfe
“Steam rising underneath a canopy of whispering, changing aspens; starlight in the clear, dark night, and wondrous beauty in every direction. If only all could feel this way, to be so captured and enthralled with autumn.”
~Donna Lynn Hope
“It was a beautiful, bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.”
~Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
“I see the turning of a leaf dancing in an autumn sun, and brilliant shades of crimson glowing when the day is done.”
~Hazelmarie Mattie Elliott
Love Fall Quotes
“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.”
~Emily Brontë
“Oh your sweet disposition/And my wide-eyed gaze/We’re singing in the car getting lost upstate/Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place/And I can picture it after all these days.”
~Taylor Swift
“Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few. September, November And these few precious days I’ll spend with you.”
~Frank Sinatra
“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.”
~John Donne
“I was just telling Claire about a guy I met in bread class. I hate him, but he could be my soul mate.”
~Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost
“Or maybe spring is the season of love and fall the season of mad lust. Spring for flirting but fall for the untamed delicious wild thing.”
~Elizabeth Cohen, The Hypothetical Girl
Short Autumn Quotes
“If the leaves are changing, I feel poetry in the air.”
~Laura Jaworski
“And all at once, summer collapsed into fall.”
~Oscar Wilde
“Notice that autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche
“There is no season such delight can bring,
As summer, autumn, winter and the spring.”
∼William Browne
“… the spring, the summer, The chilling autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world By their increase, now knows not which is which.”
~William Shakespeare
“Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile.”
[Indian Summer]”
~John Howard Bryant
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
~Henry David Thoreau
“Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.”
~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
“Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.”
~Chad Sugg
“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.”
~Jim Bishop
“You are strong enough to survive the fall”
~Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars
“He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.”
~Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
“Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.”
~Robert Browning
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
First Day of Fall Quotes
“Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.”
~Elizabeth Bowen
“It’s the first day of autumn! A time of hot chocolatey mornings, and toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves!”
~Winnie the Pooh, Pooh’s Grand Adventure
What is a good fall quote?
“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
~L.M. Montgomery
Relaxing Autumn River Sounds
Further Reading
150 Spring Quotes For Life’s New Beginnings