The season that we all love is here. It comes with languid days and hot nights and that big, bright, sun-energy, all of its own.

It is necessary to prepare ourselves—welcome this expansive time. As seasons change something in us does too.

With these quotes we are reminded to transition into summer with the exuberance, laze and liquid heat that it came here to offer. May the sun open us, soften us and prepare us for the next season of our lives.

1) “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees… I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

2) “Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.” ~ Ray Bradbury

3) “Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you. “ ~ Langston Hughes

4) “Some of the best memories are made in flip flops.” ~ Kellie Elmore

5) “You must forgive my lips… they find pleasure in the most unusual places.” ~ Max Skinner

6) “It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him… alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine…wind blowing down on them out of the pine.” ~ L.M. Montgomery

7) “Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.“ ~ Sam Keen

8) “I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days… could fill with more delight than fifty common years could contain.” ~ John Keats

9) “You should be kissed—and often—and by someone who knows how.” ~ Rhett Butler

10) “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.” ~ John Steinbeck

11) “To love and to be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.” ~ David Viscott

12) “It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.”  ~ Maud Hart Lovelace

13) “Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil.” ~ Roman Payne

14) “I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.” ~ Violette Leduc

15) “I felt like summer had taken me over.” ~ Junot Diaz

16) “At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away… all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower.” ~ Alison Croggon

17) “If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.” ~ Bern Williams

18) “Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.” ~ Russel Baker

19) “Be like the flower, turn your face to the sun.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

20) “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” ~ Henry James

21) “You’re really wearing that dress like you’re doing it a favor.” ~ Jacob Palmer

22) “Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair…” ~ Susan Polis Schutz

23) “Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people.” ~ Deb Caletti

24)  “I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.” ~ L.M. Montgomery

25)  “We thread our way through a moving forest of ice-cream cones and crimson thighs.” ~ Jean-Dominique Bauby

26) “The luxury of all summer’s sweet sensation is to be found when one lies at length in the warm, fragrant grass, soaked with sunshine.” ~ Harriet E. Prescott

27) “Summertime is always the best of what might be.“ ~ Charles Bowden

28) ”Most of the shadows in our life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

29) “Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes…A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.” ~ Ada Louise Huxtable

30) “There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.” ~ Celia Thaxter

31) “A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.” ~ James Dent

32) “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” ~ William Shakespeare

33) “It’s a smile, it’s a kiss, it’s a sip of wine…it’s summertime!” ~ Kenny Chesney

34) “Summer-induced stupidity. That was the diagnosis.” ~Aimee Friedman

35) “Among the delights of summer were picnics to the woods.” ~ Georg Brandes

36) “Ô, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.” ~ Roman Payne

37) “Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.” ~ Pablo Neruda

38) “A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.” ~ St. Francis of Assisi

39) “Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill, laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.” ~ Rupert Brooke

Go find a meadow, a lover, an ocean, a breeze, an open window to lean ourself out of. Frolic. This time of year, it is best to feel the breeze on scantily clothed bodies and cool water on browned, warm flesh.

Enjoy it, with these incorrigible quotes tucked in your pocket!

One last thought to leave you with…

40) Heliophilia: desire to stay in the sun, always.

Author: Sarah Norrad

Image: Nikko/Flickr 

Editors: Renée Picard; Emily Bartran