For Summer Quotes & Sayings

And you'd see that 2/28 interest only ARM mortgages were only 5.85% of the pool in early 2004, but by late 2004 they were 17.48% of the pool, and by late summer 2005 25.34% of the pool. Yet average FICO [consumer credit] scores for the pool, percent of no-doc ["Liar"] loan to value measures and other indicators were pretty static ... . The point is that these measures could stay roughly static, but the overall pool of mortgages being issued, packaged and sold off was worsening in quality, because for the same average FICO scores or the same average loan to value, you were getting a higher percentage of interest only mortgages. — Michael Lewis

It was a beautiful Indian summer morning and perfect for savoring a few extra minutes in bed. There was a breeze blowing through my bedroom window; the air was as crisp as a bite of a fresh red apple. — Nancy B. Brewer

It was summer here and he wondered if there existed a different season for every corner of this world in this moment and the moments to come. Whether if you traveled fast and far enough you could witness a year passing in a single journey. — Paul Yoon

In the summer of 2007, I was sitting in a studio in Dublin, debating with a lay spokesman of the Roman Catholic Church who turned out to be the only believing Christian on a discussion panel of five people. He was a perfectly nice and rather modest logic-chopping polemicist, happy enough to go for a glass of refreshment after the program, and I suddenly felt a piercing stab of pity for him. A generation ago in Ireland, the Church did not have to lower itself in this way. It raised its voice only slightly, and was instantly obeyed by the Parliament, the schools, and the media. It could and did forbid divorce, contraception, the publication of certain books, and the utterance of certain opinions. Now it is discredited and in decline. Its once-absolute doctrines appear ridiculous: — Christopher Hitchens

Let your rest be perfect in its season, like the rest of waters that are still. If you will have a model or your living, take neither the stars, for they fly without ceasing, nor the ocean that ebbs and flows, nor the river that cannot stay, but rather let your life be like that of the summer air, which has times of noble energy and times of perfect peace. It fills the sails of ships upon the sea, and the miller thanks it on the breezy uplands; it works generously for the health and wealth of all men, yet it claims it hours of rest.. I have pushed the fleet, I have turned the mill, I have refreshed the city, and now though the captain may walk impatiently on the quarter-deck, and the miller swear, and the city stink, I will stir no more until it pleases me. — Philip Gilbert Hamerton

... the matter was new to me, and I had no material for its treatment. But I got books, read up the facts, laboriously constructed a skeleton out of the dry bones of the real, and then clothed them, and tried to breathe into them life, and in this last aim I had pleasure. With me it was a difficult and anxious time till my facts were found, selected, and properly pointed; nor could I rest from research and effort till I was satisfied of correct anatomy; the strength of my inward repugnance to the idea of flaw or falsity sometimes enabled me to shun egregious blunders; but the knowledge was not there in my head, ready and mellow; it had not been down in Spring, grown in Summer, harvested in Autumn, and garnered through Winter; whatever I wanted I must go out and gather fresh; glean of wild herbs my lap full, and shred them green into the pot. — Charlotte Bronte

Summer is the annual permission slip to be lazy. To do nothing and have it count for something. To lie in the grass and count the stars. To sit on a branch and study the clouds. — Regina Brett

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers. — Jonathan Swift

A woman calls from Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She's sure of it. Now she's only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all heir luggage, and their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof.
Bermuda triangulated. — Chuck Palahniuk

She could not think what it would be to teach school twelve miles away from home, along among strangers. The less she thought of it the better, for she must go, and she must meet whatever happened as it came.
"Now Mary can have everting she needs, and she can come home this next summer," she said. "Oh, Pa, do you think I - I can teach school?"
"I do, Laura," said Pa. "I am sure of it. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

Three a.m. drunks, all over America, were staring at the walls, having finally give it up. You didn't have to be drunk to get hurt, to be zeroed out by a woman; but you could get hurt and become a drunk. You might think for a while, especially when you were young, that luck was with you, and sometimes it was. But there were all manner of averages and laws working that you know nothing about, even as you imagined things were going well. Some night, some hot summer Thursday, night you became the drunk, you were out there alone in a cheap rented room, and no matter how many times you'd been out there before, it was no help, it was even worse because you had got to thinking you wouldn't face it again. All you could do was light another cigarette, pour another drink, check the peeling walls for lips and eyes. What men and women did to each other was beyond comprehension. — Charles Bukowski

Our winters are very long here, very long and very monotonous. But we don't complain about it downstairs, we're shielded against the winter. Oh, spring does come eventually, and summer, and they last for a while, but now, looking back, spring and summer seem too short, as if they were not much more than a couple of days, and even on those days, no matter how lovely the day, it still snows occasionally. — Franz Kafka

Alas! it is but little we have done for our Master's glory. Our winter has lasted all too long. We are as cold as ice when we should feel a summer's glow and bloom with sacred flowers. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I wrap my arms around him and hold on for as long as I dare.

I honestly don't know how I'm ever going to give him up when summer comes to an end. — Sarina Bowen

I've certainly collaborated with others for their songs and it's fun. To me, it's exciting to write from a place that doesn't have to be so true to my life and is more just storytelling. — The Rocket Summer

The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture - its only value to provide shade for the livestock - but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as well as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor - especially if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer's day - could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic. — Graham Swift

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world. — Ada Louise Huxtable

The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it touched his forehead as gently as a kiss.
'Pock! There,' said Czernobog. 'Is done.' There was a smile on his face that Shadow had never seen before, an easy, comfortable smile, like sunshine on a summer's day. The old man walked over to the case, and he put the hammer away, and closed the bag, and pushed it back under the sideboard.
'Czernobog?' asked Shadow. Then, 'Are you Czernobog?'
'Yes. For today,' said the old man. 'By tomorrow, it will all be Bielebog. But today, is still Czernobog.'
'Then why? Why didn't you kill me when you could?'
The old man took out an unfiltered cigarette from a pack in his pocket. He took a large box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette with a match. He seemed deep in thought. 'Because,' said the old man, after some time, 'there is blood. But there is also gratitude. And it has been a long, long winter. — Neil Gaiman

August briefly tried that on for size. Wondered if he longed for summer because summer made it so much easier to breathe. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

In the summer I stretch out on the shore And think of you. Had I told the sea What I felt for you, It would have left its shores, Its shells, Its fish, And followed me. — Nizar Qabbani

Now at the breakfast table, watching him eat my toast, "Don't take no for an answer" seemed like the attitude of a privileged guy who didn't care who got hurt, so long as his wife had the cute statues she wanted to display in her summer house. — E. Lockhart

Once more their weird laughter of the loons comes to my ear, the distance lends it a musical, melancholy sound. For a dangerous ledge off the lighthouse island floats in on the still air the gentle trolling of a warning bell as it swings on the rocking buoy; it might be tolling for the passing of summer and sweet weather with that persistent, pensive chime. — Celia Thaxter

For they are the knights of summer, and winter is coming. — George R R Martin

Game by game is how I judge myself. At the end of the season, yeah, I do look back and think about how many games I've been available for, how many goals I've scored, how I've contributed. But that's what the summer's for. For now, you just look to the next one. — Michael Owen

It is unlikely that someone could proclaim "truths" that are counter to physical laws for very long (for example, that it is healthy for children to run around in bathing suits in winter and in fur coats in summer) without appearing ridiculous. But it is perfectly normal to speak of the necessity of striking and humiliating children and robbing them of their autonomy, at the same time using such high-sounding words as chastising, upbringing, and guiding onto the right path. — Alice Miller

It takes no prisoners. We had to completely change wardrobe for the girls because we had summer wardrobe set and it was so frigidly cold while we were shooting. And the bug population was through the roof, that summer. It was just silly! The fact that we even survived at all is shocking. The fact that we came out of it with a movie that I really like is awe-inspiring. — Katie Aselton

1. the Hindole Raga is heard only at dawn in the spring, to evoke the mood of universal love; 2. Deepaka Raga is played during the evening in summer, to arouse compassion; 3. Megha Raga is a melody for midday in the rainy season, to summon courage; 4. Bhairava Raga is played in the mornings of August, September, October, to achieve tranquillity; 5. Sri Raga is reserved for autumn twilights, to attain pure love; 6. Malkounsa Raga is heard at midnights in winter, for valor. — Paramahansa Yogananda

It occurred to her, sadly, and not for the first time, that as you grew older you became busier, and time went faster and faster, the months pushing each other rudely out of the way, and the years slipping off the calendar and into the past. Once, there had been time. Time to stand, or sit, and just look at daffodils. Or to abandon housekeeping, on the spur of the moment, walk out of the back door and up the hill, into the lark-song emptiness of a summer morning. — Rosamunde Pilcher

The Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea at his summer palace and invited the bishops to attend, all expenses paid. As an added lure, he even mentioned "the excellent temperature of the air." Constantine had his own agenda. He wanted to get this unsettled problem of Jesus' identity straightened out so that Christianity could better serve as cement for his sprawling empire. He — Daniel C. Maguire

Was it really that fucking great to be gay? Ever since he got too fucked up to drive home and he'd crashed at Day and God's place after their cookout this summer. Green was in Miami testifying in a Federal case, so he didn't have his usual designated driver. Shit. He'd heard his lieutenants going at it in the middle of the night. It was so loud and violent, but wildly erotic. He didn't know if they forgot he was downstairs or if they just didn't give a fuck. He remembered being hard as goddamn stone lying there, and feeling like a pervert for listening. But since then, he hadn't been able to get the sounds out of his head. The sounds of furious passion and uninhibited ecstasy. The way God roared his lover's name when he ca - " "Time — A.E. Via

It was kind of a beautiful day, finally real summer in Indianapolis, warm and humid - the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world. Dad was waiting for us, wearing a tan suit, standing in a handicapped parking spot typing away on his handheld. He waved as we parked and then hugged me. "What a day," he said. "If we lived in California, they'd all be like this. — John Green

Halloween is an ancient druidic holiday, one the Celtic peoples have celebrated for millennia. It is the crack between the last golden rays of summer and the dark of winter; the delicately balanced tweak of the year before it is given over entirely to the dark; a time for the souls of the departed to squint, to peek and perhaps to travel through the gap. What could be more thrilling and worthy of celebration than that? It is a time to celebrate sweet bounty, as the harvest is brought in. It is a time of excitement and pleasure for children before the dark sets in. We should all celebrate that. — Jenny Colgan

This is worse than Hollywood, he thought. A girl comes in with a pork chop and I write a song for her. — Eva Ibbotson

The man said that a portion of track just up into the mountain pass had been damaged by a rockslide early that morning, and they had shut down the whole system for maybe as long as the rest of the summer. The man shook his head, incredulous, disgusted, but also delighted in the way that people are often delighted by bad news, or the opportunity to discuss bad news that does not immediately affect them. — Amanda Coplin

And now I know that you're the one
I've waited my whole life for
You're budding leaves turning green in spring
You're the fresh breath of air that summer brings
You're the autumn sky painted in rainbow hues
You're the wintry ocean dancing in shimmering blues
You're the air I breahte
You're the water I drink
You're the fire inside me
The earth under my feet
You're the one — Kendall Grey

Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying
'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer's in the meadow
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow
'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.
And if you come, when all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be
You'll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.
And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above me
And all my dreams will warm and sweeter be
If you'll not fail to tell me that you love me
I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.
I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me. — Fred E. Weatherly

Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The boughs of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul. — Wallace Stevens

When there was a summer of bad bush fires, all that was left of the house was the brick recess that had held the stove and open fire. Lush rains followed, and with the earth nourished by the ashes, a pine near the front, surviving the holocaust, gave birth to a grove of deep green trees, turning the old tumbledown house into an oasis, causing the travelers to exclaim at the beauty and watch with excitement for the village coming up, perhaps as a peaceful and pretty as the trees. — Olga Masters

David Henderson's 1970 poem "Keep on Pushing," also analyzed the geographies of urban warfare in the Summer of 1964's Harlem Riots. Henderson warned of the crude mathematics of wide avenues that can swallow protest pickets, easily dismantle popular barricades, and muster five hundred cops in fifteen minutes, but he also suggests how, "For Harlem/ reinforcements come from the Bronx / just over the three-borough Bridge. / a shot a cry a rumor / can muster five hundred Negroes / from idle and strategic street corners / bars stoops hallways windows. — Anonymous

Then after a long time Annie wasn't a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen. — Robert Penn Warren

My parents wanted us to be pool-safe, so I had lessons when I was 18 months old. I would like to share with all the parents out there that I was that kid who cried during every one of my lessons. But it wasn't an option for my parents; we had a backyard pool, so I needed to learn how to swim. — Summer Sanders

There were three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit the country which we had now entered: first, the loggers, who, for a part of the year, the winter and spring, are far the most numerous, but in the summer, except for a few explorers for timber, completely desert it; second, the few settlers I have named, the only permanent inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for the former; third, the hunters, mostly Indians, who range over it in their season. — Henry David Thoreau

I went to art school for about a year. I was born and raised in the Willamette Valley in Oregon into a middle-class family who didn't have the funds to say, "Here, kid. Here's your money for school." So I worked real hard during the summer and saved money and was able to go to school for a year and borrowed a little money which I paid back after that first year. — Mike Royer

We never had a pool, right. So one summer, I remember. My dad, to make me happy. You know I was bummed out cause we didn't have the pool. So one summer he bought us this thing. It was yellow, you laid it on the lawn, sprayed it with the water, run across. Slip n' Slide. Yeah. Would have been fun if dad checked for rocks before he laid it down! Slip n' Bleed from the anus they should have called this ride. — Dane Cook

Mrs. Steadman, do you have a first name?" The question had taken her aback, and she had stammered out, "Well, of course I do. It's Summer." The boy's eyes had widened. "Summer? I like that name." She had shared the reason for her unusual name, watching his eyebrows rise. When she was finished, he had exclaimed, "You're like me, then. You don't have a ma, either." She had shaken her head. "No, I don't." Abruptly, he had turned the conversation back to her name. "May I call you Summer? When it's just us, I mean? Not in front of Rupert. — Kim Vogel Sawyer

He never gave up his search for the Door into Summer. — Robert A. Heinlein

People seldom think of soup for summer, so they are unusual - an interesting, unusual touch for the first course or for dessert. I find cold soups very refreshing. I serve them in cups rather than in bowls, usually, and let people sip them. You don't really need a spoon for soups that are all one consistency. — Ruth Glick

An aphrodisiac will disappear,
delusional, like permanence or wealth -
a shimmering, as if love were a ghost -
and yet my passion for you seethes and sears
without an end. Late April leaves can't crave
caress of dew, sunlight's sweet splash, more than
I pine for your embrace, us turned to one;
when harsh reversals scar, the thought of you will salve
like summer wind in autumn; deep red blood
surging along with mine, staid genes worked hot
from your electric charms, as all my moods
succumb to your sweet fire, and perfect wit.
Now you are all I live for - loving you -
in fleeting world of lies, you are the truth. — Lauren Lipton

Cabel felt the familiar nostalgic excitement of the endless possibilities encapsulated in a summers' night at Silver Beach. He smiled at himself as a boy and, more ruefully, at the man who now stood on the worn planks of the boardwalk. This night held no possibilities for him, though it was pleasant to remember a time when it did. — Erin Farwell

I remember when I was twenty-five," he said. "No client comes to you when you're twenty-five. It's like when you are looking for a doctor. You don't want the new one that just graduated. You don't want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys. — Daniel Amory

SEASONS PASSED, FALL AND WINTER and spring and summer. Leaves blew in through the open door of Lucius Clarke's shop, and rain, and the green outrageous hopeful light of spring. People came and went, grandmothers and doll collectors and little girls with their mothers. Edward Tulane waited. The seasons turned into years. Edward Tulane waited. He repeated the old doll's words over and over until they wore a smooth groove of hope in his brain: Someone will come; someone will come for you. — Kate DiCamillo

We invest far off places with a certain romance ... Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game; none of them lasts for ever. Your own life, or your bands, or even your species - might be owed to a restless few, drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands, and new worlds. — Carl Sagan

I live between Barcelona and Berlin. Staying in Spain over the winter and Berlin for spring and summer is an ideal combination. — Daniel Bruhl

It's a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it's light out. — Bill Watterson

You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there's always something wrong. Everywhere you look, there are insects thickening the air, and birds rifling trees, and enormous, heavy leaves dragging down branches. You want to trammel it, wreck it, smash things down. The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters. * — Emily Fridlund

Flies are the price we pay for summer. — Ann Zwinger

And then she is kissing me, right here on the sidewalk on a foggy summer night. Violet is kissing me, and everything is perfect. The kiss doesn't end. We are not two girls on a polite first date, bestowing a customary good-night peck.
No.
We are kissing like girls who have ached for each other for years who never even spoke but somehow exchanged I love yous anyway. — Nina LaCour

I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I'm outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer - in hibernation. I write with the bears. — Terry Tempest Williams

'Rent' was a special project for me. It was my first notable screenplay job. I worked with two wonderful directors on it, starting with Spike Lee in the summer of 2001. I wrote a draft for Spike and he was really good to me. — Stephen Chbosky

Sprinting for a full day in Atlanta in midsummer proved very challenging. That humidity is crazy. Georgia is a beautiful state, but the weather is intense. I was warned, but for some reason I thought it would be like L.A. in the summer. The reality? No. — Theo James

I think one of my highpoints was definitely well, everything started turning around on Barry Manilow week. I had so much fun on disco week, love disco music. I think I picked some songs that really worked for me and people really enjoyed them. I loved doing the Donna Summers song and she was the guest judge, and she was the guest judge and I felt honored. She said she loved the song and said I made it my own. — Diana DeGarmo

Midwest kids got to summer camp. There is something very special about being away from your parents for the first time, sleeping under the stars, hiking and canoeing. — Jami Gertz

Prospects for growth in the year ahead are solid at the national level, and of course, this can only be good news for the Bay Area and California as well. The U. S. economy has shown remarkable resilience in the face of some severe shocks - in particular, the surge in energy prices that began a couple of years ago and the devastation wrought by the twin hurricanes last summer. — Janet Yellen

(Algerian athlete, 1996 Summer Olympics, on the 3000m world record)
I think my 3:27 for 1500m is worth 7:21 for 3000m. — Noureddine Morceli

A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing "classical" music; that two, he was doing it "softly"; and that three, "there were not many readers around in summer." I was there, a one-man multitude. — Vladimir Nabokov

For breakfast, I always have eggs - whole eggs. I think the fats are really important. I also like turkey bacon and really hearty whole-grain bread. I'm very picky about it. You need bread that's high in fiber and low in carbs. It's hard to find, but it's worth it. — Summer Glau

The first time that I entered through the double-locked doors of the psych ward I was terrified, believing for no real reason that such places harbored evil souls ready to assault me at any moment. But once inside I found it to be the slowest-moving place on Earth, and I saw that these patients were unique only in that time had stopped inside their wounds, which were seemingly never to heal. The pain was so thick and palpable in the psych ward that a visitor could breathe it like the heavy humidity of summer air, and I soon realized that the challenge would not be to defend myself from patients, but to defend myself against my own increasing indifference toward them. What originally struck me as cryptic in chapter fifty-nine was now mundane: they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeding. — Hope Jahren

Summer is for surrendering; winter is for wondering. — Debasish Mridha

Ireland, in breadth, and for wholesomeness and serenity of climate, far surpasses Britain; for the snow scarcely ever lies there above three days: no man makes hay in the summer for winter's provision, or builds stables for his beasts of burden ... the island abounds in milk and honey. — Venerable Bede

The successful truck gardener can never go out to dinner in the summer or spend a week end away, because his conscience tells him he has to be at home eating up his corn or packaging his beans for the freezer. — Phyllis McGinley

How do you greet a god? If there's an etiquette guide for that, I haven't read it. I'm never sure if I'm supposed to shake hands, kneel, or bow and shout, "We're not worthy!" I knew Hermes better than most of the Olympians. Over the years, he'd helped me out several times. Unfortunately last summer I'd also fought his demigod son Luke, who'd been corrupted by the Titan Kronos, in a mortal combat smack-down for the fate of the world. Luke's death hadn't been entirely my fault, but it still put a damper on my relationship with Hermes. I decided to start simple. "Hi. — Rick Riordan

Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy fine,
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine.
No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June
Beside the trickling stream.
One such to melt at the tongue's root,
Confounding taste with scent,
Beats a full peck of garden fruit:
Which points my argument. — Robert Graves

Love hits you when you least expect it, grabs you, sucks you in whole, and twists you around until you could hardly breathe. Love hurts like a sucker punch, that's both glorious and beautiful. Falling for Summer was like that for me, every time. — Kailin Gow

Crying is like a thundershower for the soul. The air feels so wonderful after the rain. Don't think too much. Breathe. Don't be harsh or demanding on yourself. Just experience your feelings and know that your tears are announcing change in your life. Change is coming; like a summer rain - to wash away your pain. Have faith that things are getting better. — Bryant McGill

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house ... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail. — Paul Auster

Hi, I have just added my new novel, "Incessant Expectations" for your reading enjoyment. It is about commercial salmon fishing on the Oregon coast circa 1976. It is fiction. The industry doesn't exist anymore. A young farmer from the dry country in Southwestern Colorado visits the wet Northwestern Oregon coast, seeking a summer job after his dad's farm is sold in the spring. He has spent his first 22 years in isolation, doing hard labor on the family farm. He knows hard work but has little social experience. During his summer of 1976 he learns about the ocean, fishing, and women. — Kenneth Fenter

He would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign. — Mark Twain

As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them. — Neil Gaiman

I wish I could remember the first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me;
If bright or dim the season it might be;
Summer or winter for aught I can say.
So, unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was i to see and to forsee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom, yet, for many a May. — Christina Rossetti

Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,
I shall have only good to say of you. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I really love New York, but I have to say, the humidity during the summer is a nightmare for a cartoonist. Not only am I sweating in my studio, my bristol board is curling up, the drafting tape is peeling off the board, my Rapidograph pens bleed the minute I put them to paper ... it's a disaster. — Adrian Tomine

I started out in pre-law. I was going to go to law school. And I saw a production of 'Tally's Folly' that spring term. I took a theater class that term and auditioned for 'Harvey' at the end of the summer, and I was in a play every semester after that. — Kevin Rahm

In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that 'queen Katherine is the true queen of England — Peter Ackroyd

I am always producing work, but there is always a sort of deadline where you have to finish work. I don't do it for a show. In other words, I am not like a fashion designer where I have a, you know - I have to put out the full line or I have to put out the summer line like that. — Robert Barry

Are there not a thousand forms of sorrow? Is the sorrow of death the same as the sorrow of knowing the pain in a child's future? What about the melancholy of music? Is it the same as the melancholy of a summer dusk? Is the loss I was feeling for my father the same I would have felt for a man better-fit to the world, a man who might have thrown a baseball with me or taken me out in the mornings to fish? Both we call grief. I don't think we have words for our feelings any more than we have words for our thoughts. — Ethan Canin

I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure. — Roman Payne

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night
hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe? — Kathryn Davis

Snegiryov, fussing and bewildered, ran after the coffin in his old, short, almost summer coat, bare-headed, with his old wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand. He was in some sort of insoluble anxiety, now reaching out suddenly to support the head of the coffin, which only interfered with the bearers, then running alongside to see if he could find a place for himself. A flower fell on the snow, and he simply rushed to pick it up, as if God knows what might come from the loss of this flower. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Shraken-nurse turned on the nozzles for each of the drips, and the contents began to work their respective ways through his system. The left drip had a chill to it that made him feel like he was bathing in a ice-bath pumped full of extra strong Earth-based mint; while the right hand fluids were warm and fuzzy, like he was four years old and sleeping in a barrelful of teddy-bears on a hot summer's day. They quickly found their way up to his brain, and collided there in a meeting of hot and cold that, had the encounter happened in the atmosphere, would have produced the biggest cumulus cloud in the cosmos. — John K. Irvine

Here is my room, in the yellow lamplight and the space heater rumbling: Indian rug red as Cochise's blood, a desk with seven mystic drawers, a chair covered in material as velvety blue-black as Batman's cape, an aquarium holding tiny fish so pale you could see their hearts beat, the aforementioned dresser covered with decals from Revell model airplane kits, a bed with a quilt sewn by a relative of Jefferson Davis's, a closet, and the shelves, oh, yes, the shelves. The troves of treasure. On those shelves are stacks of me: hundreds of comic books- Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four ... The shelves go on for miles and miles. My collection of marbles gleams in a mason jar. My dried cicada waits to sing again in the summer. My Duncan yo-yo that whistles except the string is broken and Dad's got to fix it. — Robert McCammon

I've always been serious that way, trying to evolve to a more conscious state. Funny thing about that,though. You tweak yourself,looking for more love, less lust, more compassion, less jealousy. You keep tweaking, keep adjusting those knobs until you can no longer find the original settings. In some sense,the original settings are exactly what I'm looking for-a return to the easygoing guy i was before my world got complicated, the nice guy who took things as they came and laughed so hard the blues would blow away in the summer wind. — Bill Withers

I ran with him and suddenly I was released from fear as the mad, God-given joy of battle came to me for the very first time. Later, much later, I learned that the joy and the fear are the exact same things, the one merely transformed into the other by action, but on that summer afternoon I was suddenly elated. May God and His angels forgive me, but that day I discovered the joy that lies in battle and for a long time afterwards I craved it like a thirsty man seeking water. — Bernard Cornwell

Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim. — Jacques Barzun

Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer's uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green Movement, not another round of useless sanctions. — Reza Aslan

Our children were mostly brought up and educated in the Churchill suburb east of Pittsburgh. Each summer, we took them back to England for an extended period. — John Pople

There, below the cliffs, is a bay of sand where the rocks stand up like the fangs of wolves, and no boat or swimmer can live when the tide is breaking round them. To right and left of the bay the sea has driven arches through the cliff. The rocks are purple and rose-coloured and pale as turquoise in the sun, and on a summer's evening when the tide is low and the sun is sinking, men see on the horizon land that comes and goes with the light. It is the Summer Isle, which (they say) floats and sinks at the will of heaven, the Island of Glass through which the clouds and stars can be seen, but which for those who dwell there is full of trees and grass and springs of sweet water . . .' The — Mary Stewart

As the seasons age us
I close my eyes and wish for snow
Alas the Irish seasons been foretold
For Spring will dawn and I will go
Into another season Jack Frost cold.
And when its here, I wish for night
As childhood memories flash right by
To see the birds in humble flight
I wish for Summer with a sigh
And on I go to months so sweet
Dawns sweet chorus and sunbeams bright
I yearn for Autumn leaves under feet
Yet now I dream of Winters night
As Auld Lang Syne rings in New Year
Alas! I'm one year older as Spring draws near. — Michelle Geaney

I lived in South Africa until I was 11 when we first immigrated. My mom had sent me back there when I was 14 for summer vacation. I wasn't doing very well in school, my grades were slipping. I called my mom one day and told her that I wasn't coming back. I ended up staying there until I was 17 before coming back to North America. — Kandyse McClure

There is no word for time.
Today we will
not think to number another summer
or watch its white bird into the ground. — Anne Sexton

For my first week as a new boy at Radley College, back in the summer of 1979, I was followed around by a film crew. — James Lovegrove