Now I cannot get enough of winter.
—Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume
This is a dream of Winter, sweet as Spring.
—Edward Thomas, from “Swedes”
The winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out.
—D. H. Lawrence, letter, November 9, 1915
There is a commonly used formulation, “wintrum frod,” which means literally “wise in winters.”
—Alexandra Harris, Weatherland
We’re myth-making creatures. We need the ancient, slow, general meanings for time to persist beyond the quick, particular things that happen in our particular lives.
—Francis Spufford, “Winter Night”
For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world—legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea—scattered, uncoordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined.
—Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing
Summer and winter, seed time and harvest, ploughing and lambing—these at least do not change.
—Winifred Holtby, South Riding
The wars were one thing but winter was worse.
—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage
Territory is everything in winter. To be forced to roam in the open would be fatal.
—Robbie Cowen, Common Ground
It is winter now: the wind howls
The snowy fox and the snowy owls
Hunt in the night. I stay within.
—Stevie Smith, from “When the wind . . . ”
Winter has set in; draw the curtains; light the fire; and so to work.
—Virginia Woolf, diary, October 15, 1930
Some fellows talk about New York
But I shall stay at home.
—Sarah Orne Jewett, from “A Country Boy in Winter”
In winter, I had rather be at home.
—Jonathan Swift, letter to John Worrall, January 5, 1728
Chicago is also in a state of extraordinary winter nullity, and we haven’t seen many people. Winter nights are long. I have an electric blanket and read War and Peace.
—Saul Bellow, letter to Edward Shils, December 15, 1966
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
—T. S. Eliot, from The Waste Land
Winter belongs to the night; the days are but its poor relations who do their best to stay out of the way.
—Konstantin Paustovsky, The Story of a Life
There are animals that sleep all the winter; — I am, I believe, become one of them: they creep into holes in the same season; — I have confined myself to the fireside of a snug parlour. . . . My mind has certainly been asleep all the while; and whenever I have attempted to deploy it, I have felt an oppression in my head which has obliged me to desist.
—Anna Laetitia Barbauld, letter to Mrs. Beecroft, January 1814 (collected in Winter: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons)
It turns out that not many animals do truly hibernate, let go of that hard-won skill of keeping themselves warm from the inside out, because like all risky private lettings-go it is not easy to find a place safe enough to do it in.
—Diana Kappel-Smith, Wintering
More than any other season, winter requires a kind of metronome that ticks away its darkest beats, giving us a melody to follow into spring.
—Katherine May, Wintering
My husband calms my fears. Again and again, on little scraps of paper, he marks the course of the sun, which since 23 December has been on its way back to us. He calculates the degrees and minutes for me, demonstrating that the sun is now as near to us as it was distant on 9 December. But I am in despair. All his explanations only tell me how far away the sun is.
—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night
In fact the light had come up today marginally earlier than yesterday. And yesterday’s light had been up a sliver earlier than the day’s before that. There was this different quality to the light only four days past the shortest day; the shift, the reversal, from increase of darkness to increase of light, revealed that a coming back of light was at the heart of midwinter equally as much as a waning of light.
—Ali Smith, Winter
I leaned upon the coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
—Thomas Hardy, from “The Darkling Thrush”
In the pale splendour of the winter sun.
—John Clare, from “Schoolboys in Winter”
Through a pane a
beam like a warm hand
laid upon an arm.
—James Schuyler, from “In Wiry Winter”
The moon spreads winter. All the cold falls from this moon that glitters in the sky like a piece of ice.
—Jules Renard, journal, December 1898
He has his Winter too of pale misfeature
—John Keats, from “The Human Seasons”
The minus thirties and forties are not very cold as we were to understand cold afterwards, but quite cold enough to start with.
—Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
When the winter came
I thought it might never leave us;
or would never leave without me
I began to plot how I might wrap myself
in it / send myself back:
beg a sparrow’s wing
a pomegranate’s ride.
—Carrie Olivia Adams, from “Winter Came”
Die ere long, I’m sure, I shall;
After leaves, the tree must fall.
—Robert Herrick, “After Autumn, Winter”
Winter came down upon them. The suicide season arrived early. The land, after a snowfall, would turn into a lunar stillness, satanic, brilliant. The tall trees, altered by the snow and ice, loomed up in the arctic landscape like ancient cataclysmic formations of malicious splendor.
—Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights
The bare earth is unsightly. This winter is but unburied summer.
—Henry David Thoreau, journal, January 24, 1858
almost everything here has cold hands
—Alice Oswald, from “Cold Streak”
Towards the end of November [1662], Londoners woke to find their rooftops covered with snow, the first for three years. It was the start of weeks of icy cold. [King] Charles took Catherine to St James’s Park to watch people skating on the new canal. This was a novel diversion, learnt in Holland by many exiles who had brought back their iron and steel skates. The watchers were entranced, among them John Evelyn, who waxed lyrical about the “strange and wonderful dexterity of the sliders,” how fast they sped by, “how sudainly they stop in full carriere upon the Ice, before their Majesties.” Evelyn went home by water, “but not without exceeding difficultie, the Thames being froze, greate flakes of yce incompassing our boate.”
—Jenny Uglow, A Gambling Man
That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.
—Ali Smith, Winter
The air cold as contrition.
—Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree
How pleasant a sense of preparedness for the winter.
—Henry David Thoreau, journal, December 13, 1855
Midwinter, the perfect time to be a goth: you’re in tune with the misery all around you.
—Zadie Smith, Swing Time
Now for poets, rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, mathematicians, sophisters, etc., they are like grasshoppers, sing they must in summer, and pine in winter, for there is no preferment for them.
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Let me congratulate you on the spring coming in, and do you in return condole with me on the winter going out.
—Charles Lamb, letter to Bernard Barton, February 25, 1830
There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice.
—John Keats, from “Hyperion”
Hares make sad havock in the garden: they have eaten up all the pinks; & now devour the winter cabbage-plants.
—Gilbert White, journal, December 18, 1783
I’ve had a glorious winter. I’ve made strange friends for whom I care a great deal.
—Langston Hughes, letter to Alain Locke, April 1923
And I dread winter because it is the season of comfort!
—Arthur Rimbaud, “Farewell," translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel
I think after this stinking winter the weather ought to be better this year.
—George Orwell, known for his optimism, letter, March 20, 1947
Summer is the time for squabbles; in winter we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths.
—George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
On several occasions this winter, we had to shovel a path for the geese, to make it possible for them to get from their pen in the barn to their favorite loitering spot in the barn cellar. Imagine a man’s shoveling a path for a goose! So the goose can loiter!
—E. B. White, “The Winter of the Great Snows”
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It
The trees in winter, those exact diagrams of all our dead yearnings.
—Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought
Showers of snow
As squirrels dislodge what’s
Piled on branches,
Plowing their streets,
Searching for seeds,
Shifting the silent suspension
Once more into flakes,
Giving gravity again its sway.
—Me, “Winter Neighbors”
The end of winter. . . . The type of weather where a day of sunshine feels like a stranger being kind to you when you cry.
—Jia Tolentino, “What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away”
If Winter come to Winter
When shall men hope for Spring?
—Laurence Binyon, from “Invocation to Youth”
You can’t get too much winter in the winter.
—Robert Frost, from “Snow”
I may have traveled too far into winter.
—Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume