Autumn And Death Quotes & Sayings
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Top Autumn And Death Quotes

When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?
Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute? — Dan Simmons

All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window. — Robert Lowell

Nay, could their numbers countervail the stars,
Or ever-drizzling drops of April showers,
Or wither'd leaves that autumn shaketh down,
Yet would the Soldan by his conquering power
So scatter and consume them in his rage,
That not a man should live to rue their fall. — Christopher Marlowe

It was autumn, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive. The fetus bailed out without a parachute. It landed in the sideline Astroturf, so upsetting the cheerleaders that for the remained of the afternoon their rahs were more like squeaks. — Tom Robbins

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

Thou goest home this night to thy home of winter, To thy home of autumn, of spring, and of summer; Thou goest home this night to thy perpetual home, To thine eternal bed, to thine eternal slumber. Sleep thou, sleep, and away with thy sorrow, Sleep thou, sleep, and away with thy sorrow, Sleep thou, sleep, and away with thy sorrow, Sleep, thou beloved, in the Rock of the fold. The shade of death lies upon thy face, beloved, But the Jesus of grace has His hand round about thee; In nearness to the Trinity farewell to thy pains, Christ stands before thee and peace is in His mind. Jenny, Ian, Fergus, and Marsali joined in, murmuring the final verse with him. Sleep, O sleep in the calm of all calm, Sleep, O sleep in the guidance of guidance, Sleep, O sleep in the love of all loves, Sleep, O beloved, in the Lord of life, Sleep, O beloved, in the God of life! — Diana Gabaldon

Whether that lady's gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness where it left delight,
I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odors there,
In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death or change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.
(--Conclusion, Autumn - A Dirge) — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Here will I live in the rainy season, here in the autumn and in the summer: thus muses the fool. He realizes not the danger (of death). — Gautama Buddha

summer ends and autumn begins. The trees retract their sap in a hurry and the resulting bright colours must be a panic-stricken response to the sudden withdrawal of that life-blood. Because the sight's so beautiful, you forget what this gorgeous display actually represents. Decay and death. If only human death were so glorious. — Linda Gillard

On the day when death will knock at thy door what wilt thou offer to him?
Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel of my life---I will never let him go with empty hands.
All the sweet vintage of all my autumn days and summer nights, all the earnings and gleanings of my busy life will I place before him at the close of my days when death will knock at my door. — Rabindranath Tagore

Those who romanticize war often like to think of it, at least in areas of mortal peril, as nothing but "guts and glory." Those who are inclined to pacifism, by contrast, often think of it as an unbroken sequence of horrors. Actually, however, people in wartime still fall in love, do the laundry, worry about pimples, drink beer, and do most of the same things that they do in times of peace. The patterns of daily life may be mundane, but they are remarkably tenacious.
But, while people in wartime still go about their daily routines, the prospect of imminent death can give even quotidian chores a heightened intensity. When the first bombs were dropped on London in autumn of 1940, the population bore adversity better than almost anybody had expected. The danger was mixed with excitement, and the terror had a sort of apocalyptic magnificence. — Boria Sax

What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss. — Henry Ward Beecher

The locals died and shrivelled with the autumnal leaves as their plastic, seasonal smiles faded with the last of the holidaymakers. — Moonshine Noire

Sad, slow music in the small hours of the morning isn't just sad and slow music. It's a narration. And through the myriad of morning dew, we are the twinkling stars that fade with the rising sun. — Dave Matthes

Autumn in the Highlands would be brief - a glorious riot of color blazing red across the moors and gleaming every shade of gold in the forests of sheltered glens. Those achingly beautiful images would be painted again and again across the hills and in the shivering waters of the mountain tarns until the harsh winds of winter sent the last quaking leaf to its death on the frozen ground. — Elizabeth Stuart

Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood. It waits in alleys and metro stops. After the sun goes down plugs are pulled by white-clad guardians and death is invited into an antiseptic room.
But in the country death comes, uninvited, during the day. It takes fishermen in their longboats. It grabs children by the ankles as they swim. In winter it calls them down a slope too steep for their budding skills, and crosses their skies at the tips. It waits along the shore where snow met ice not long ago but now, unseen by sparkling eyes, a little water touches the shore, and the skater makes a circle slightly larger than intended. Death stands in the woods with a bow and arrow at dawn and dusk. And it tugs cars off the road in broad daylight, the tires spinning furiously on ice or snow, or bright autumn leaves. — Louise Penny

I will tell you something that you don't want to hear: Autumn is ugly! Look at the dying leaves! There is no beauty in dying! Death is always ugly! The beauty of autumn is just an illusion, my friend! Wake up and see the real truth! See the crying leaves! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

What do you see to the south?" Tanis asked abruptly.
Raistilin glanced at him. "What do I ever see with these eyes of mine Half-Elf?" the mage whispered bitterly. "I see death, death and destruction. I see war." He gestured up above. "The constellations have not returned. The Queen of Darkness is not defeated."
"We may have not won the war," Tanis began, "but surely we have won a major battle
"
Raistlin coughed and shook his head sadly.
"Do you see no hope?"
"Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in the vain attempt to reach it."
"Are you saying we should just give up?" Tanis asked, irritably tossing the bark away.
"I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open," Raistin answered. Coughing he drew his robes more closely around him. — Margaret Weis

I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death — Lin Yutang

If only humans could die like the autumn leaves, with a splash of beauty and the promise of another season. — Shana Chartier

There was a filmy veil of soft dull mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects, giving them a lilac hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was singing ... The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them all low to the ground. Already one or two kept constantly floating down, amber and golden in the low slanting sun-rays. — Elizabeth Gaskell

The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death. They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colors of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them. — Joseph Roth

Death is the only certainty in life. The moment we are born, our journey towards our final destination begins. It's the beauty or the ugliness of that journey that defines our life; the distances covered varying in each case. Every flower that has bloomed in the free breeze of spring has to wither in the cruel icy autumn draught. — Anurag Shourie

Last year in the region where we live part of the year there were violent windstorms, whole forests were leveled, two- and three-hundred-year-old trees torn up by the roots and tossed aside, houses sliced almost in half by the once-sheltering giants flung down through their roofs. Yesterday another storm, powerful but less so, took down no trees. The ground, though, is littered with leaves, as though autumn had arrived, but the leaves are still green, still alive, many torn away in clumps, with the twigs still intact that attached them to their branches. There's something disconsolate about them - the desiccated leaves of autumn always appear to have found the place to which they've been destined, but these don't seem to grasp what's happened to them: they lie on the ground at awkward angles, like things wounded that haven't completely given in to death and don't know yet they must. — C. K. Williams

Cold autumn, wan with wrath of wind and rain,
Saw pass a soul sweet as the sovereign tune
That death smote silent when he smote again. — Algernon Charles Swinburne

But we who remain shall grow old
We shall know the cold
Of cheerless
Winter and the rain of Autumn and the sting
Of poverty, of love despised and of disgraces,
And mirrors showing stained and aging faces,
And the long ranges of comfortless years
And the long gamut of human fears ...
But, for you, it shall forever be spring,
And only you shall be forever fearless,
And only you have white, straight, tireless limbs,
And only you, where the water-lily swims
Shall walk along the pathways thro' the willows
Of your west.
You who went West,
and only you on silvery twilight pillows
Shall take your rest
In the soft sweet glooms
Of twilight rooms ... — Ford Madox Ford

The Cherokees had 1,200 miles to go before they reached eastern Oklahoma, the end of the trek they would forever be remembered as the Trail of Tears. As their homeland disappeared behind them, the cold autumn rains continued to fall, bringing disease and death. Four thousand shallow graves marked the trail. Marauding parties of white men appeared, seized Cherokee horses in payment for imaginary debts, and rode off. The Indians pressed on, the sullen troopers riding beside them. They — Robert M. Utley

A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. And gift. By focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation. Life is neither linear nor stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. — Rachel Naomi Remen

He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom. — Anton Chekhov

Time can do all sorts of things. It's almost like a magician. It can turn autumn into spring and babies into children, seeds into flowers and tadpoles into frogs, caterpillars into cocoons, and cocoons into butterflies. And life into death. There's nothing that time can't do. Except run backwards. That's its trouble really, it can only go one way. — Alex Shearer

Talent has the four seasons: spring, that is to say, the sowing of the seeds; summer, growth; autumn, the harvest; winter, intellectual death. But there is now and then a genius who has no winter, and, no matter how many years he may live, on the blossom of his thought no snow falls. Genius has the climate of perpetual growth. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again ... the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of the old October. — Thomas Wolfe

And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country. — Anton Chekhov

And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world ... — Ray Bradbury

His sister Kat, her husband, Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney's cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of woolen bales; dead to the autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes baking. — Hilary Mantel

And autumn ain't so shabby for wow, either. The colors are broccoli and flame and fox fur. The tang is apples, death, and wood smoke. The rot smells faintly of grapes, of fermentation, of one element being changed alchemically into another, and the air is moist and you sleep under two down comforters in a cold room. The trails are not dusty anymore, and you get to wear your favorite sweaters. — Anne Lamott

Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. We've set it loose. We've opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn't want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now. — Don DeLillo

Flowers, cold from the dew,
And autumn's approaching breath,
I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,
Which haven't faded yet.
In their nights, fragrantly resinous,
Entwined with delightful mystery,
They will breathe in her springlike
Extraordinary beauty.
But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,
From her shing head they will flutter
And fall-and before her
They will die, faintly fragrant still.
And, impelled by faithful longing,
My obedient gaze will feast upon them-
With a reverent hand,
Love will gather their rotting remains. — Anna Akhmatova

It seemed like it was always autumn in this field - it was fitting really. Everything was shaded with the bronzes and yellows of faded pictures from an old photo album, it was a realm where uncomfortable nostalgia reigned. I noticed it more after my experience in the dream. There I was an actor in the play, here I was a spectator. — Mike Jackson

Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves. — Rabindranath Tagore

Life and death are nothing but the mind. Years, months, days, and hours are nothing but the mind. Dreams, illusions, and mirages are nothing but the mind. The bubbles of water and the flames of fire are nothing but the mind. The flowers of the spring and the moon of the autumn are nothing but the mind. Confusions and dangers are nothing but the mind. — Dogen

In the utter peace and stillness the world seemed holding its breath, a little apprehensively, drawing near to the fire to warm itself. There was none of that sense of urgeful, pushing life that robs even a calm spring day of the sense of silence; life was over and the year was just waiting, harboring its strength for the final storms and turmoil of its death. The warmth and the color of maturity was there, exultant and burning, visible to the eyes, but the prophecy of decay was felt in a faint shiver of cold at morning and evening and a tiny sigh of the elms at midnight when a wandering ghost of a wind plucked a little of their gold away from them. — Elizabeth Goudge

It is this, not the spirits, that frightens us; shall we never be free, even after we die? — Emilie Autumn

This body is like the earth. Our bones are like mountains. Our belly is like the sea. Our flesh is like the dust and mud. The hair that grows on us is like plants, and the skin from which this hair grows is like arable land, and the area of our body where hair does not grow is akin to saline soil. Our sadness is like darkness and our laughter like sunlight. Sleep is brother to death. Our childhood is like spring, our youth like summer. Our maturity is like the autumn, our old age like the winter of life. All of our movements are like the stars moving in the sky. — Shems Friedlander

Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter - which is the door of death - but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile. — Catherynne M Valente

This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain. — Gautama Buddha

As leaves cover the forest floor in a carpet of vibrant rusts, orange and gold, autumn proves that sometimes death too can be a beautiful thing. — Nikita Gill

The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. — Virginia Woolf

Letty allowed her to ramble on while she looked around the wood, remembering its autumn carpet of beech leaves and wondering if it could be the kind of place to lie down in and prepare for death when life became too much to be endured. — Barbara Pym

As he walked, the sad faded leaves were driven pitilessly around him by the wind, and under the mingling influences of autumn and evening, a craving for the quietude of the grave ... overtook him with unwanted intensity. — Georges Rodenbach

Day by day as autumn tanned the valley around us, now with bright frost weather, now with rain carrying the first chill of winter, my father stayed in the dusk of his grief. That sandbagged mood, I understand now, can only have been a kind of battle fatigue-the senses blasted around in him by that morning of death and the thousands of inflicting minutes it was followed by. — Ivan Doig

The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.
pp. 181-182 — Timothy Snyder

Well, that was life. Gladness and pain ... hope and fear ... and change. Always change! You could not help it. You had to let the old go and take the new to your heart ... learn to love it and then let it go in turn. Spring, lovely as it was, must yield to summer and summer lose itself in autumn. The birth ... the bridal ... the death ... — L.M. Montgomery

It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down;
It was not night, for all the bells
Put out their tongues, for noon.
It was not frost, for on my flesh
I felt siroccos crawl,
Nor fire, for just my marble feet
Could keep a chancel cool.
And yet it tasted like them all;
The figures I have seen
Set orderly, for burial,
Reminded me of mine,
As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key;
And I was like midnight, some,
When everything that ticked has stopped,
And space stares, all around,
Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground.
But most like chaos,--stopless, cool,
Without a chance or spar,--
Or even a report of land
To justify despair. — Emily Dickinson

What happened to that man I was seven autumns ago? What happened to that country? Time heals, yes - and thank God the pain and terror of that time has abated, at least for most of us. In that sense time is a mercy. But time also obscures the life-giving truths we perceive in the light of the shadow of death. In that way, time is a curse. — Rod Dreher

I really loved Kiyoyori-in the way you people love each other, and we, not so much. I had never felt that before. I should be able to pass away without regret, as easily as the leaf falls from the tree in autumn, but the idea of never seeing him again, in whatever form, fills me with sorrow. I cling to life for his sake. This is what love does to you Shikanoko. See how the false wolf grows more real every day, because it has become attached to you. It shivers at your approach and wags its tail at the sound of your voice. It has made you its master, it lives for your affection. But, as your saints teach and we have always known, attachment enslaves you. Only those free from it see the world as it really is and have power over themselves and all things. — Lian Hearn

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves. — D.H. Lawrence

Autumn
Autumn: the year breathes dully towards its death,
beside its dying sacrificial fire;
the dim world's middle-age of vain desire
is strangely troubled, waiting for the breath
that speaks the winter's welcome malison
to fix it in the unremembering sleep:
the silent woods brood o'er an anxious deep,
and in the faded sorrow of the sun,
I see my dreams' dead colours, one by one,
forth-conjur'd from their smouldering palaces,
fade slowly with the sigh of the passing year.
They wander not nor wring their hands nor weep,
discrown'd belated dreams! but in the drear
and lingering world we sit among the trees
and bow our heads as they, with frozen mouth,
looking, in ashen reverie, towards the clear
sad splendour of the winter of the far south.
Christopher John Brennan — Christopher John Brennan