The arrival of fall does bring with it a certain sort of magic.

As the leaves turn to crimson, and we prepare to hibernate for the coming winter, there is still some time to step outside and appreciate the golden rays of the autumnal sun…

Or cozy up with a cup of hot tea and read through these inspirational quotes. In them, we may find the reason this season moves us so—for poets and authors have never ceased to discover the beauty found in letting go of one thing and the arrival of another.

1. “It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.” ~ Sarah Addison Allen

2. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

3. “Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.” ~ Yoko Ono

4. “Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.” ~ J.K. Rowling

5. “Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile.” ~ William Cullen Bryant

6. “But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass…it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favourite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories.” ~ Stephen King

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

8. “Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.” ~ Chad Sugg

9. “At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled…” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

10. “Autumn—that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness.” ~ Jane Austen

11. “Wind warns…the blown leaves make bat-shapes, web-winged and furious.” ~ Sylvia Plath

12. “Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.”~ Jim Bishop

13. “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

14. “To ask why we fall in love is to ask why the leaves fall. And to ask how we stay in love is to ask how the trees stay.” ~ Jinvirle

15. “Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.” ~ Rémy de Gourmont

16. “Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

17. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold; When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang; Upon those boughs, which shake against the cold.” ~ William Shakespeare

18. “The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.” ~ Ray Bradbury

19. “Know that transformation sometimes begins with a fall. So never curse the fall.” ~ Yasmin Mogahed

20. “Days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches…” ~ L.M. Montgomery

21. “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.” ~ Charles Dickens

22. “It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears—the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?” ~ Mervyn Peake

23. “The fires burn, and the kettles sing, and earth sinks to rest until next spring.” ~ Clyde Watson

24. “I told some imprecisely imagined interlocutor that each year I hoped to have outgrown being moved by the autumn and each year I hadn’t.” ~ Brigid Brophy

25. “But you can’t plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter.” ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

26. “I was drinking in the surroundings: air so crisp you could snap it with your fingers.” ~ Wendy Delsol

27. “And it was…the year’s last passionate love affair before it grew old and died from the frosty bite of winter.” ~ V.C. Andrews

28. “I am no different than the weather, the planets or the trees; For there do not always have to be reasons for the seasons turning inside of me.” ~ Suzy Kassem

29. “It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.” ~ P.D. James

30. “Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard.” ~ Walt Whitman

31. “The tints of autumn…a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.” ~ John Greenleaf Whittier

32. “It’s autumn I’ve chosen as this year’s friend.” ~ Anna Akhmatova

33. “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

34. “The goldenrod is yellow. The corn is turning brown…the trees in apple orchards with fruit are bending down.” ~ Helen Hunt Jackson

35. “There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—touch of manner, hint of mood; And my heart is like a rhyme, with the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.” ~ Bliss Carman

36. “We pretended she’d only gotten lost in the colors of fall.” ~ T. Greenwood

37. “There was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.” ~ Wallace Stegner

38. ”Let misty autumn be our part! The twilight of the year is sweet: Where shadow and the darkness meet…” ~ Ernest Dowson

39. “In the fall, I believe again in poetry if nothing else.” ~ Jaakko A. Ahokas

40. “A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame…it was now deep autumn in the mountains.” ~ Aspen Matis

So, let’s pull out our favourite sweaters, unwrap our most loved books and enjoy the inward movement of this fall. For just as this season comes with it’s sweet melancholy, so do does it come with it’s natural, brilliant hues of joy.

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Author: Sarah Norrad

Image: Instagram @olga.bogdanova03

Editor: Yoli Ramazzina