July 26, 2024, 8:47 p.m.
As the vibrant colors of summer give way to the rich, warm tones of autumn, there's a certain magic in the air that captivates our hearts and minds. Fall is a season of transformation, a time when the world around us shifts into a tapestry of oranges, reds, and yellows, inviting reflection, gratitude, and a touch of nostalgia. Whether you're inspired by the crisp air, the rustling of falling leaves, or the cozy comfort of a warm drink by the fire, autumn offers countless moments to cherish. In this spirit, we've curated a collection of the top 82 autumn quotes that encapsulate the essence of this beloved season. Dive in and let these words inspire you to savor every golden moment of fall.
1. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” - Henry David Thoreau
2. “Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.” - Yoko Ono
3. “Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.” - Jane Austen
4. “You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.” - Ernest Hemingway
5. “Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.” - J.K. Rowling
6. “At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
7. “The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. [...] The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.” - Ray Bradbury
8. “That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.” - Ray Bradbury
9. “If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.Your school wasn't on fire, you were.” - Jonathan Lethem
10. “It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.” - P.D. James
11. “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."[The Autumnal]” - John Donne
12. “Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!” - Humbert Wolfe
13. “Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.” - Robert Browning
14. “I saw old Autumn in the misty mornStand shadowless like silence, listeningTo silence, for no lonely bird would singInto his hollow ear from woods forlorn,Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn; --Shaking his languid locks all dewy brightWith tangled gossamer that fell by night,Pearling his coronet of golden corn.” - Thomas Hood
15. “Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.” - Charles Nodier
16. “Autumn...the year's last, loveliest smile."[Indian Summer]” - John Howard Bryant
17. “Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.” - Jim Bishop
18. “The goldenrod is yellow,The corn is turning brown...The trees in apple orchardsWith fruit are bending down.” - Helen Hunt Jackson
19. “Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard."[Give me the splendid silent sun]” - Walt Whitman
20. “Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.” - Hal Borland
21. “October proved a riot a riot to the senses and climaxed those giddy last weeks before Halloween.” - Keith Donohue
22. “I ate breakfast in the kitchen by candle-light, and then drove the five miles to the station through the most glorious October colouring. The sun came up on the way, and the swamp maples and dogwood glowed crimson and orange and the stone walls and cornfields sparkled with hoar frost; the air was keen and clear and full of promise. I knew something was going to happen. ” - Jean Webster
23. “Leaves covered pavement like soggy cereal.” - Patricia Cornwell
24. “Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they're falling likethey're falling in love with the ground.” - Andrea Gibson
25. “The magic of autumn has seized the countryside; now that the sun isn't ripening anything it shines for the sake of the golden age; for the sake of Eden; to please the moon for all I know.” - Elizabeth Coatsworth
26. “Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.” - Remy De Gourmont
27. “I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” - L. M. Montgomery
28. “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
29. “I met Anne in the autumn... Autumn, that wild season when rural men rack orchard trees with sticks and weep with the desire to kiss faraway Demeter’s supple breasts—to set lips to her travel-swollen eyes. They seek goddesses, but I desired only Anne. ” - Roman Payne
30. “It's September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it.” - Pam Houston
31. “The widower reviewed his past in a sunless light which was intensified by the greyness of the November twilight, whilst the bells subtly impregnated the surrounding atmosphere with the melody of sounds that faded like the ashes of dead years.” - Georges Rodenbach
32. “Kareeda niKarasu no tomarikeriAki no kuretrans:On a bare branchA crow is perched -Autumn evening” - Basho
33. “Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.” - Truman Capote
34. “And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?” - Mervyn Peake
35. “He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother's house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring.But, it was a little different tonight. There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years.There would be no spring. ("The October Game")” - Ray Bradbury
36. “Nobody moved.Everybody sat in the dark cellar, suspended in the suddenly frozen task of this October game; the wind blew outside, banging the house, the smell of pumpkins and apples filled the room with smell of the objects in their fingers while one boy cried, “I'll go upstairs and look!” and he ran upstairs hopefully and out around the house, four times around the house, calling, “Marion, Marion, Marion!” over and over and at last coming slowly down the stairs into the waiting breathing cellar and saying to the darkness, “I can't find her.”Then... some idiot turned on the lights.("The October Game")” - Ray Bradbury
37. “Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.” - Chad Sugg
38. “Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don't notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin.” - Michelle Zink
39. “She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened.” - Sarah Addison Allen
40. “I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it.” - Lee Maynard
41. “Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.” - Lauren DeStefano
42. “Why should I wake when I'm half past dead?” - Emilie Autumn
43. “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, whirled the leaves. ("The North")” - Yevgeny Zamyatin
44. “But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.” - Stephen King
45. “To-day I thinkOnly with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,And the square mustard field;Odours that riseWhen the spade wounds the root of tree,Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,Rhubarb or celery;The smoke's smell, too,Flowing from where a bonfire burnsThe dead, the waste, the dangerous,And all to sweetness turns.It is enoughTo smell, to crumble the dark earth,While the robin sings over againSad songs of Autumn mirth."- A poem called DIGGING.” - Edward Thomas
46. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsWith a sweet kernel; to set budding more,And still more, later flowers for the bees,Until they think warm days will never cease,For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.” - John Keats
47. “It was one of those perfect New York October afternoons, when the explosion of oranges and yellows against the bright blue sky makes you feel like your life is passing through your fingers, that you've felt this autumn-feeling before and you'll probably get to feel it again, but one day you won't anymore, because you'll be dead.” - Sarah Dunn
48. “Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.” - Samuel Butler
49. “Autumn that year painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under harvest skies.” - Sharon Kay Penman
50. “Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.” - Shauna Niequist
51. “Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)” - Tim Willocks
52. “...as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.” - Daphne du Maurier
53. “[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.” - Wallace Stegner
54. “There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.” - Joe L. Wheeler
55. “A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.” - François-René de Chateaubriand
56. “My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.” - Henry Beston
57. “Mothman flew away from town, like a giant bat, and then disappeared from sight behind a thicket of skeletal autumn trees.” - Don Roff
58. “Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.” - Reiner Maria Rilke
59. “Tiho, o tiho govori mi jesen;Šuštanjem lišća i šapatom kiše.Al zima srcu govori još tiše.I kada sniježi, a spušta se tama,U pahuljama tišina je sama.” - Dobriša Cesarić
60. “I was drinking in the surroundings: air so crisp you could snap it with your fingers and greens in every lush shade imaginable offset by autumnal flashes of red and yellow.” - Wendy Delsol
61. “Fall colors are funny. They’re so bright and intense and beautiful. It’s like nature is trying to fill you up with color, to saturate you so you can stockpile it before winter turns everything muted and dreary.” - Siobhan Vivian
62. “The smell of burning firewood and the molding of organic, earthy substances reminded her of jumping wildly into the enormous leaf piles of autumns past and she suddenly wished that it was appropriate for someone her age to do such a thing.” - Abby Slovin
63. “Truly, Autumn is my season,” the scarlet beast chorted. “Spring and Summer and Winter all begin with such late letters! But Autumn and Fall, I have loved best, because they are best to love.” - Catherynne M. Valente
64. “Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves, O flakes of snow, For which, through naked trees, the winds A-mourning go?” - John Banister Tabb
65. “Autumn is no time to lie alone” - Murasaki Shikibu
66. “When the autumn meets the tranquillity, there you can see the King of the Sceneries!” - Mehmet Murat ildan
67. “Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?” - Dodie Smith
68. “Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't die, that's what they say, can't die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmere who only whispers, and now they're coming and I'm nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be the one! If they live forever, why not me?” - Ray Bradbury
69. “And you say Paris is gay, but it has its down times. You say go in the spring and not the summer, because watching the autumn creep through the Rive Gauche preparing for winter is hard.” - Darnell Lamont Walker
70. “Winter is dead; spring is crazy; summer is cheerful and autumn is wise!” - Mehmet Murat ildan
71. “Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they're going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you'd smell from a bottle of Tide.” - Allison Winn Scotch
72. “Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.” - David Mitchell
73. “The multicolored leaves were softly glowing against the black sky, creating an untimely nocturnal rainbow which scattered its spectral tints everywhere and dyed the night with a harvest of hues: peach gold and pumpkin orange, honey yellow and winy amber, apple red and plum violet. Luminous within their leafy shapes, the colors cast themselves across the darkness and were splattered upon our streets and our fields and our faces. Everything was resplendent with the pyrotechnics of a new autumn.” - Thomas Ligotti
74. “I knew by the signs it would be a hard winter. The hollies bore a heavy crop of berries and birds stripped them bare. Crows quarreled in reaped fields and owls cried in the mountains, mournful as widows. Fur and moss grew thicker than usual. Cold rains came, driven sideways through the trees by north winds, and snows followed.” - Sarah Micklem
75. “Maybe late afternoon is autumn; summer’s retreatnot being archived, but suspended, as the featheredvane of a bird wings its way across the avenue.” - Michelle Cahill
76. “L'automne est un deuxième ressort où chaque feuille est une fleur.” - Albert Camus
77. “His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life.” - Neil Gaiman
78. “The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night silence. Issac felt strangely wakeful. He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he began to grow sleepy; for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moan of the wind in the wood. ("The Dream Woman")” - Wilkie Collins
79. “Cuộc đời là một giấc mộng, và mùa thu là cõi mộng trong mơ!” - Mehmet Murat ildan
80. “Enchantment and fulfillment were on the gold and garnet horizon - autumn's breath, a dormant dream reawakened, a yearning nearly satiated, a tender thank you with a brush of the lips, and a connection as fingers touch and go hand in hand.” - Donna Lynn Hope
81. “For us old-age pensioners, autumn is on the whole a dangerous season. He who knows how difficult it is for us to achieve any stability at all, how difficult it is to avoid distraction or destruction by one's own hand, will understant tha autumn, its winds, disturbances, and atmospheric confusions, does not favour our existence, which is precarious anyway.” - Bruno Schulz
82. “When she had arranged her household affairs, she came to the library and bade me follow her. Then, with the mirror still swinging against her knees, she led me through the garden and the wilderness down to a misty wood. It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady's knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires.("The Basilisk")” - R. Murray Gilchrist