Quotes & Sayings About Indian Summer

Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze. At last, after September, another weather arrives, an Indian summer that occasionally endures until Christmas. — Truman Capote

The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. — Henry David Thoreau

Last summer we had eight people in the [Christian] congregation who danced four different sun dances. Of course the missionaries have said all along that those ceremonies are pagan and we can't do that. Our people insist that they are free in the gospel, free in Christ Jesus, to participate in Indian religious forms and ceremonies. - George Tinker — Jim Wallis

I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half closed lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn't. He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under his picture he had answered the standard "My heart belongs to" with "Susie Salmon." I guess he had had plans. I remember his lips were chapped. — Alice Sebold

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. — Grace Metalious

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

He had become enveloped in the Indian Summer of the Soul. — O. Henry

Indian summer is like a woman. — Grace Metalious

The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air. — Wallace Stegner

The Indian Summer, the dead Summer's soul. — Mary C. Ames

i am permanently
tanned
in the summer of poetry. — Sanober Khan

As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark - or Europe or the Pacific - in the summer of 1944. — Philip Roth

Another day the ladybugs arrive. Thousands of them, soaking up the sun on the back door. It's an Indian summer day, warm, with temperatures in the upper sixties and plentiful sun. — Mary Kubica

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before. — Herman Wouk

We lived in Indian summer and mistook it for spring. — Bruce Catton

Autumn...the year's last, loveliest smile."

[Indian Summer] — William Cullen Bryant

Goddamnit, in your Love Fever
I am suffering from Heart Tumor
You must be adept ... you Pretty Charmer
I am falling for you ... in this Indian Summer — Heenashree Khandelwal

In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Horn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it was pointed out to him that this was probably not the most prudent time to be taking treasures from Indian lands, Cope thought for a minute and decided to press on anyway. — Bill Bryson

Each golden day was cherished to the full, for one had the feeling that each must be the last. Tomorrow it would be winter. — Elizabeth Enright

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus. — John Banville

Sometimes he comes to me in my dreams, and I wonder if ironically all our stories were written on his skin back there in Texas City in 1947. Or maybe that's just poetic illusion purchased by time. But even in the middle of an Indian summer's day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta's rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people. — James Lee Burke

It was an Indian summer afternoon in Indiana, a rare gift. We walked home slowly. I thought Mom might be wrong about me having all I needed, but just at that moment, I had no need to complain. — Haven Kimmel

Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Yesterday the sea was as smooth as a mirror; it is smooth as a mirror today. The island is having an Indian summer. Such a mild, warm Indian summer! Yet there is no sun. It is years since I knew such peace, perhaps twenty or thirty years; or perhaps it was in a previous life. Whenever it was, I must surely have tasted before now this peace that I feel as I walk around in ecstasies, humming to myself, caring for every stone and every straw, and sensing that they care for me once more. We are friends. As I follow the overgrown path through the forest, my heart trembles with an unearthly joy. — Knut Hamsun

Thus a man looking through a tremendous telescope does not see the cirri of an Indian summer above his charmed orchard, but does see, as my regretted colleague, the late Professor Alexander Ivanchenko, twice saw, the swarming of hesperozoa in a humid valley of the planet Venus. — Vladimir Nabokov

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer, Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing, Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects, Ceaseless, insistent. The grasshopper's horn, and far-off, high in the maples, The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence Under a moon waning and worn, broken, Tired with summer. — Sara Teasdale

In my opinion, it was chiefly owing to their deep contemplation in their silent retreats in the days of youth that the old Indian orators acquired the habit of carefully arranging their thoughts.
They listened to the warbling of birds and noted the grandeur and the beauties of the forest. The majestic clouds - which appear like mountains of granite floating in the air - the golden tints of a summer evening sky, and the changes of nature, possessed a mysterious significance.
All of this combined to furnish ample matter for reflection to the contemplating youth. — Francis Assikinack

How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,
with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails. — Henry David Thoreau

They arrived without warning on a perfect Indian summer day. — R.J. Harlick

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled. — Henry Adams

It was Indian summer, a bluebird sort of day as we call it in the north, warm and sunny, without a breath of wind; the water was sky-blue, the shores a bank of solid gold. — Sigurd F. Olson

Each day the sun shone, the birds lingered, though the trees were turning, purely out of habit, and their rose and yellow and rust looked strange and beautiful above the brilliant green grass. — Elizabeth Enright

If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my had. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation. — Brady Udall

The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian Summer in New England. — Kurt Vonnegut

Indian summer comes gently, folds over the hills and valleys as softly as the fall of a leaf on a windless day. It is always unexpected. After a sharp cold spell, we wake one morning and look out and the very air is golden. The sky has a delicate dreamy color, and the yet unfallen leaves on the bravest trees have a secure look, as if they would never, never fall. — Gladys Taber

The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in ... How beautifully they go to their graves! How gently lay themselves down and turn to mould. They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when people, with our boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and ripe-with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed our bodies. — Henry David Thoreau

Then in October, Indian Summer, the air turned so soft, the sunlight so fragile, and each day's loveliness so poignantly doomed that even self-ignorance and restlessness felt like profound states of being, and he just wandered the empty beaches and misty headlands in a state of serene confusion and awe. — David James Duncan

Molly watched the pale water, changing, always changing, and always the same, and she could feel him near, not touching, not speaking. Thin clouds chased across the face of the swelling moon. Soon it would be full, the harvest moon, the end of Indian summer. The moon was so cleanly outlined, so unambiguous, she thought. A misshapen bowl, like an artifact made by inexpert hands that would improve with practice. — Kate Wilhelm

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible. — John Irving

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 sniffed hopefully, trying to smell fall in the air, but sadly got a whiff of summer leftovers instead. I leaned down and re-tied my running shoes, wiggling my toes.

I meandered out to the road and faced my mountains wreathed in sunrise. I breathed and raised my arms high above my head, stretching and arching and working out my morning kinks.

"You look like Changing Woman greeting the Sun." A voice spoke immediately to my left.

I was startled, and my arms dropped to my sides as I whirled around. "Oh! Samuel!" I cried out. "You scared me!"

"I'm a sneaky indian, what can I say? — Amy Harmon

The clouds crossed the sky, country rains washed the gardens, moons shone on the lake and the hillsides, cicadas sang in the August grass, boys and girls fell in love. In the early October of that year, in the cathedral hush of a Quebec Indian summer with the lake drawing into its mirror the fire of the maples, it came to me that to be able to love the mystery surrounding us is the final and only sanction of human existence. What else is left but that, in the end? All our lives we had wanted to belong to something larger than ourselves. We belonged consciously to nothing now except to the pattern of our lives and fates. To God, possibly. I am chary of using that much-misused word, but I say honestly that at least I was conscious of His power. Whatever the spirit might be I did not know, but I knew it was there. Life was a gift; I knew that now. And so, much more consciously, did she. — Hugh MacLennan