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    42 Of The Most Beautiful Literary Quotes About Summer

    "In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different."

    1. "And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

    —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

    2. "It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside."

    ―Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy-Tacy and Tib

    3. "In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen."

    ―Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

    4. "Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August."

    Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

    5. "When people went on vacation, they shed their home skins, thought they could be a new person."

    ―Aimee Friedman, Sea Change

    7. "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

    8. "The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color."

    ―Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

    9. "Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine."

    ―Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

    10. "Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing."

    ―Truman Capote, Summer Crossing

    12. "Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil."

    ―Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

    13. "Green was the silence, wet was the light,

    the month of June trembled like a butterfly."

    ―Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

    14. "In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible."

    ―Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

    15. "The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change."

    ―E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

    16. "If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper..."

    ―Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

    18. "The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments."

    ―China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

    19. "It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him in silence, alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine, with the wind blowing down on them out of the pine woods."

    ―L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

    20. "At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: 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, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats."

    ―Alison Croggon, The Naming

    21. "The castle grounds were gleaming in the sunlight as though freshly painted; the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake, the satin-green lawns rippled occasionally in a gentle breeze: June had arrived."

    ―J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

    22. "The morning heat had already soaked through the walls, rising up from the floor like a ghost of summers past."

    ―Erik Tomblin, Riverside Blues

    24. "Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth."

    ―Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses: The Sea of Fertility, 2

    25. "August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages."

    ―Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes

    26. "The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing."

    ―Dan Simmons, Drood

    27. "I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies."

    ―Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

    28. "Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill."

    ―Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

    30. "The summer night was settling upon the neighborhood like a dark lace veil, casting dappled shadows on the roofs and sidewalks and lawns."

    ―Victoria Kahler, Luisa Across the Bay

    31. "The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon."

    ―Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

    32. "Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. For those few months, you're not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don't have the rest of the year. You can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. Summer just opens the door and lets you out."

    ―Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

    33. "Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare;

    And left the flushed print in a poppy there:

    Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came,

    And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame."

    ―Francis Thompson, "The Poppy"

    35. "Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats."

    ―Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

    36. "Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe."

    ―Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

    37. "Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came; and if the village had been beautiful at first, it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its richness. The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine, which lay stretched out beyond. The earth had donned her mantle of brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing."

    —Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

    39. "We thread our way through a moving forest of ice-cream cones and crimson thighs."

    ―Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

    40. It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer. Everything fades: the shimmer of gold over White Cove; the laughter in the night air; the lavender early morning light on the faces of skyscrapers, which had suddenly become so heroically tall. Every dawn seemed to promise fresh miracles, among other joys that are in short supply these days."

    ―Anna Godbersen, Bright Young Things

    41. "Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."

    ―John Lubbock, The Use Of Life

    42. "All in all, it was a never to be forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world."

    —L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

    Did we miss your favorite literary quote about summer? Let us know in the comments below!