My plan is for every other issue to be from my commonplace book, gathering quotes from my reading. Some issues will be themed, while others, most likely, will be a grab bag.
After the past three weeks of perfect early autumn weather here in Chicago, bookending Labor Day's official closing of summer, this issue's theme was easy to choose.
Tom Thomson, Autumn Foliage (1916)
At its end, summer still feels like itself.
Seasons start slowly. They end that way, too.
—Ernest Hilbert, from "Poem Begun on the Autumn Equinox"
Of seasons of the year, autumn is most melancholy.
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Its a pleasant thing, come autumn, to make plans.
—Virginia Woolf, diary, August 10, 1920
You and I, — must hit upon some little bit of vagabondism, before Autumn comes.
—Melville, letter to Hawthorne
Oh wild weekend, thou breath of autumn's being.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, notebook entry #1221
A sense of maturity, or at least of endured experience, is conveyed, for some reason, in the smell of autumn.
—Anthony Powell, A Buyer's Market
Autumn is the mind's true spring.
—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
Autumn is the spring of the spirit, when the sap flows once again in wilted urban man.
—Peter De Vries, The Tunnel of Love
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, The King of a Rainy Country
The high polish of these splendid autumn afternoons puts me at a loss.
—John Cheever, journal
It was a wild morning in October, and I observed as I was dressing how the last remaining leaves were being whirled from the solitary plane tree which graces the yard behind our house. I descended to breakfast prepared to find my companion in depressed spirits, for, like all great artists, he was easily impressed by his surroundings.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Problem of Thor Bridge"
The autumn is closing in and one's fireside begins to glow.
—Henry James, letter to William James
The soft ruin of autumn.
—Don Gilmore, Breaking and Entering
Very lovely with calm lake, but the roses fading, the hay cut. The summer is ended. Autumn begins.
—John Ruskin, diary, August 1, 1884
It was autumn. Night had begun to cramp the days.
—Ramsey Campbell, "The Brood"
Gone are the lovers, under the bush.
—Thomas Hardy, from “The Later Autumn”
The sun was low. It struck the grass like green fur, with a sparkle; the hills were like half-dried velvet, and the thin coloured leaves of the trees glittered in the long shadows and orient light: autumn trees, their branches combed by the gale and moving overhead in veil upon veil of chestnut and auburn and yellow, of flame and chrome and veridian; the large coin of the poplar paper-yellow against the high, hazy mist of the birch; the sprays hanging, nebula upon nebula, coarse-grained and fine as white flour, swaying over the riders as they made their way south in the clear, mellow air.
—Dorothy Dunnett, The Ringed Castle
The first cold blue of autumn and the melancholy of the shore provoking thoughts not only of the end of summer, but of the pressure of time, the wavering of ambition, the disappointments of love—the period of time that approaches its close like the period of the year.
—Edmund Wilson, The Twenties
I must make up my mind about the autumn lap, & my bearing. And do some quiet work: & ‘see’ people not so wearily.
—Virginia Woolf, diary, September 30, 1931
Spring cheers not, nor winter heightens our gloom; autumn hath foregone its moralities. . . . Let the sullen nothing pass.
—Charles Lamb, letter
Just the usual humdrum completely sane occasional depressions.
—Ali Smith, Autumn
He judged men and he grew apples and it was a perilous autumn for both.
—W. D. Wetherell, A Century of November
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, & if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
—George Eliot, letter, 1841
Twas Spring, ’twas Summer, all was gay,
Now Autumn bends a cloudy brow;
The flowers of spring are swept away,
And Summer fruits desert the bough.
—Samuel Johnson, from "Autumn"
The bilious gloom of a premature autumn . . .
—Lesley Blanch, Journey into the Mind’s Eye
Staggering into autumn like split-lipped boxers
we call ourselves triumphant.
—Anne Holub, from "We Owe Chicago"
To-day grieves, to-morrow grieves,
Cover me over, light-in-leaves.
—T. S. Eliot, from "New Hampshire"
The English sun has half a heart, it flickers and lurks, it sinks when you least expect it: then comes the autumn, the warm and smoky rain.
—Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light
In autumn there were days of fog that called the truth of everyday experience into question.
—Esther Kinsky, River
Everything looked so beautiful in its autumn composure.
—Sylvia Townsend Warner, letter
The Fool of Spring is a spry Fool,
The Fool of Summer replete.
The Fool of Autumn's a blithe Fool;
The Fool of Winter can't eat.
—me
Fine capillaries of winter threaded through the autumn air.
—Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time
These last days I have spent
doing nothing but reading
your John Clare.
—Will Burns, from "Autumn Again"
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
—John Clare, from “Autumn”
