Summer Falls Quotes & Sayings

She waits for his reprimand or words of disapproval.
He kisses her instead. Hard. Lips demanding, fingers tightening on her chin. He consumes her with this single act. — Laura Kreitzer

Landon drops the bloody knife and stares at Summer like he doesn't even know her anymore. The truth is, she'll never be the girl she was seven months ago. Too much has happened. Too much has changed.
"Why'd you do that?" Summer cries.
"To save you," he says.
But there's nothing left to save. — Laura Kreitzer

Summer in the trees! "It is time to strangle several bad poets." /
The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney / Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, / But afterwards beside the dead "poet" they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. /
Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. / He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. / Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor. — Kenneth Koch

You didn't tell Summer about it, did you?"
"What?" Gage scoffs. "Yeah, telling your girlfriend the Angel of Death might visit her if some switch is flipped is normal pillow talk. — Laura Kreitzer

Child, [death] is with us always," said Cadfael, patient beside him. "Last summer ninety-five men died here in the town, none of whom had done murder. For choosing the wrong side, they died. It falls upon blameless women in war, even in peace at the hands of evil men. It falls upon children who never did harm to any, upon old men, who in their lives have done good to many, and yet are brutally and senselessly slain. Never let it shake your faith that there is a balance hereafter. What you see is only a broken piece from a perfect whole."

"Such justice as we see is also but a broken shred. But it is our duty to preserve what we may, and fit together such fragments as we find, and take the rest on trust. — Ellis Peters

Dammit, Gage. What the hell were you thinking?"
"I wasn't," he shouts. "I was upset she wanted to stay, and I lost it."
Ethan scoffs. "Yeah, you did."
"I'm an idiot."
"Yeah, you are."
"Shut up. — Laura Kreitzer

Why won't you look at me?" she murmurs.
He doesn't speak, seemingly at a loss for words.
"It's my scars." It comes out as barely a whisper.
Horror spasms across his face. "What? No," he says, a bit breathless. "You're beautiful. All of you. — Laura Kreitzer

I'd never blame anyone else who falls for the same brand of seduction. I embrace that we're all similarly flawed. That makes the self-inflicted wounds hurt less. I'd read Tennessee Williams. I just didn't expect to be living my own tainted little version of Suddenly Last Summer. — Dan Skinner

Summer turns and marches away, fed up with being handled like a child. Like she's a glass doll that might break at any minute. She hasn't been a child since the day she was whipped into muteness. Anxiety might strangle her sometimes, but she's not some baby needing to be coddled. — Laura Kreitzer

A kestrel can and does hover in the dead calm of summer days, when there is not the faintest breath of wind. He will, and does, hover in the still, soft atmosphere of early autumn, when the gossamer falls in showers, coming straight down as if it were raining silk. — Richard Jefferies

Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted length of days
The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Seconds ebb and wane. She's not afraid of her voice anymore, but she's not entirely sure she trusts it. She's seen the damage caused with a single word. Right now, each one is a weapon, a conduit of war, and she won't just throw them out there all willy-nilly. — Laura Kreitzer

Struggling transforms her captor into a Chinese finger trap. She's suffocating. Sucking in air without relief. Her lungs expand. Contract. Expand. They fill with lies and broken promises. With despair and lost hope. Each inhale is empty. Invisible hands reach into her body and constrict around her windpipe. She watches her friends collapse like supernovae, their cognizance disappearing into a black hole. A black hole she's quickly cascading into. The dark consumes, bleeds into her vision. She blinks. Catches icy blue eyes peeking out from the shadows. — Laura Kreitzer

That summer rain I mean that is so quiet and matter of fact and falls straight down like a curtain. Now — Elizabeth Berg

Letter to Bill Smith, 1921

Wish to hell I was going North when you men do. Doubt if I get up this summer-Jo Eezus (Jesus), sometimes I get to thinking about the Sturgeon and Black during the nocturnal and damn near go cuckoo. May have to give it up for something I want more but that does not keep me from loving it with everything I have. Dats de way tings are. Guy loves a couple of or three steams all his life and loves 'em better than anything in the world--falls in love with a girl and the goddamn streams can dry up for all he cares. Only the hell of it is that all that country has as bad a hold on me as ever--there's as much pull this spring as there ever was--and you know how it's always been--just don't think about it all daytime, but at night it comes and ruins me--and I can't go. — Ernest Hemingway,

I can't - won't do that to him," Summer says sharply. "Or to myself. Besides, your feelings for me aren't real. The Society did this to you. And if they did it to you, they probably scrambled my brain too. I can't trust that any of this is real. — Laura Kreitzer

Why aren't you smiling?" Cameron asks. She picks up the Astropad and stops the video.
"Because this is the beginning, not the end. — Laura Kreitzer

The summer of 1830 I ... blasted the tunnel through the rock to take water from the dam above the falls for the mill ... In 1831 we lowered the tunnel four feet, and built a new dam across the creek. — Ezra Cornell

Death and his scythe do not come. No sweeping black capes or ethereal escapes. There's no pearly gate, no prisms of colors as his soul slips away. The stillness is cold steel. The silence is empty with no memory to mend it. — Laura Kreitzer

Now the day is done,
Now the shepherd sun
Drives his white flocks from the sky;
Now the flowers rest
On their mother's breast,
Hushed by her low lullaby.

Now the glowworms glance,
Now the fireflies dance,
Under fern-boughs green and high;
And the western breeze
To the forest trees
Chants a tuneful lullaby.

Now 'mid shadows deep
Falls blessed sleep,
Like dew from the summer sky;
And the whole earth dreams,
In the moon's soft beams,
While night breathes a lullaby.

Now, birdlings, rest,
In your wind-rocked nest,
Unscared by the owl's shrill cry;
For with folded wings
Little Brier swings,
And singeth your lullaby. — Louisa May Alcott

Her mum is leaning against the wall, arms crossed, when Summer exits. "Gage left from here a few minutes ago," she says, tone neutral. "His hair was ruffled." She gestures with her hand above her head.
The haze Gage left Summer in vanishes. She frowns.
Her mum sighs and steps forward. Smooths her daughter's hair. "If he hurts you," she says in a mild tone, "I'll kill him. — Laura Kreitzer

I like to eat chicken, but I don't like live chickens. With their feathers and beaks and weird noises and flapping wings." He visibly shivers, then points above his right eye. "How'd you think I got this scar?"
"I thought you said your sister threw something at you when you were a kiddie."
Rob gives him a meaningful look.
"A chicken?"
Rob points at his scar again. "Them things are no joke. — Laura Kreitzer

The rain falls endlessly, and even on the hottest of summer days, blooming white cumulus clouds float above, their shadows reminding you that summer's heat is fleeting, and the rain's never far off — Gayle Forman

Her gaze travels back to the lie twisted in a tempest of mud and blood. She witnesses the culmination of her recklessness through a curved lens. Absorbed in life uncoiling, unaware of the world beyond this ridge. His light hair, darkened by rain. His stiff shoulders, full of pain. The vision poisoned with truth. With rust-stained hues. — Laura Kreitzer

When I see your scars, do I want to erase them? Absolutely. But not your physical scars. The real ones, beneath the surface. The ones that compel you to stay silent or force you to cringe. Those are the scars I want to obliterate." His finger circles the dip of a burn mark on her forearm. "This is a battle trophy and nothing to be ashamed of. Every one of your scars makes you more beautiful to me. — Laura Kreitzer

I thought it was just him," she says, ignoring him. "But then I found out I had the same effect, which means the Society did something to my head too."
Gage's eyes close, horror washing over him. "You really do love him."
"Yes. No. I don't know." Her cries start up again, piercing his heart. "Gage, help me."
"I love you," he says, holding her closer. "That's real. — Laura Kreitzer

Dreams deny her the freedom she truly seeks. Darkness consumes. Leg muscles burn. She runs away, even while lost in the paradise of sleep. Gravity is a crushing force bearing down on her chest, shattering wings and refusing her flight. A whisper in her mind. You don't belong here. — Laura Kreitzer

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 night surrounds, breathes across her skin. They're lost in the shadows of the moon. — Laura Kreitzer

To him it seemed a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten. — W.G. Sebald

The name Kyirong means "the village of happiness," and it really deserves the name. I shall never cease thinking of this place with yearning, and if I can choose where to pass the evening of my life, it will be in Kyirong. There I would build myself a house of red cedar wood and have one of the rushing mountain streams running through my garden, in which every kind of fruit would grow, for though its altitude is over 9,000 feet, Kyirong lies on the twenty-eighth parallel. When we arrived in January the temperature was just below freezing it seldom falls below -10 degrees Centigrade. The seasons correspond to the Alps, but the vegetation is subtropical. Once can go skiing the whole year round, and in the summer there is a row of 20,000-footers to climb. — Heinrich Harrer

Magic?' Kate snorted. 'There's no such thing. Is there?'
'Magic?' Barnabas shrugged. 'Why not? Magic is cool.'
'But there has to be a rational explanation.'
'Oh there is,' Barnabas led her our of the cave and back to the shore. 'But a rational explanation is rather complex. We're dealing with a psycho-temporal entity manifesting through a critical mass of its sentient shell ... um. Magic sounds more fun. — James Goss

Summer rushes in on the heels of spring, eager to take her turn; and then she dances with wild abandon. But the time soon comes when she gratefully falls, exhausted and sated, into the auburn arms of autumn. — Cristen Rodgers

Pleasures lie thickest where no pleasures seem: There's not a leaf that falls upon the ground But holds some joy of silence or of sound, Some spirits begotten of a summer dream. — Samuel Laman Blanchard

Time is a thief. A killer. Time is killing him. — Laura Kreitzer

That," she says, then clears her throat. "That's a bit terrifying."
His lips twitch. "Isn't that a side effect of love? — Laura Kreitzer

You should've told me," she repeats. "Because here's a news flash: You might've wanted to shelter me, but there's nowhere you can hide me that'll keep me safe from what's inside my head. — Laura Kreitzer

Avery slides on his glasses and opens his eyes again. "Dammit!" he says again with more feeling. "Why does stuff like this keep happening?"
"You say that as if it's a bad thing," Rob says, smirking. — Laura Kreitzer

I don't mind summer rain. In fact I like it. It's my favourite sort.' 'Your favourite sort of rain?' said Thea. I remember that she was frowning, and pondering these words, and then she announced: 'Well, I like the rain before it falls. — Jonathan Coe

Where's your dad now?" Thomas asked.
"He's gone."
The word gone echoed all over the reservation. The reservation was gone itself, just a shell of its former self, just a fragment of the whole. But the reservation still possessed the power and rage, magic and loss, joys and jealousy. The reservation tugged at the lives of its Indians, stole from them in the middle of the night, watched impassively as the horses and salmon disappeared. But the reservation forgave, too. Sam Bone vanished between foot falls on the way to the Trading Post one summer day and reappeared years later to finish his walk. Thomas, Chess, and Checkers heard the word gone shake the foundation of the house. — Sherman Alexie

She feels him scoot closer, the heat of him radiating off his chest and absorbing into her skin. His legs straddle her from behind, and he places delicate kisses along her shoulder, her back, the very center of her spine. Each time is like an electric current surging through her, soul stirring and lovely. — Laura Kreitzer

A glacial chill rushes through Gage. He whips around just in time to see arms clutch Summer around the middle and drag her into the dark. Panic seizes him, and he takes off after her, regardless of the chaos brewing behind him. Her cry of surprise echoes all around them, drilling into his bones. — Laura Kreitzer

Maybe the Society was right all along. From the very beginning, that's what they called her. A time bomb.
Tick, tick, tick. — Laura Kreitzer

I'm sorry, he says. No two words were ever truer.
Still, she says nothing. Once a shield, now her taciturnity is brandished like a blade, carving away his sanity. She's the flaw in the paragon of life - the reason angels choose to dive to their downfalls in fiery comets of stardust. — Laura Kreitzer

He holds her for an eternity. Time cascades into the void of the past. She inhales his scent. Full of man and strength and yearning. And she wonders why she ever doubted their relationship. Why she let Julian's soothing touch coax her into loving him too. Gage is everything. Gage is hers. — Laura Kreitzer

I thought I loved Daren, and I did in a butterfly-and-hearts kind of way, but it was nothing like this. This is an asteroid shower on a summer night. A tidal wave crashing onto the breakers. Falling over the edge of Niagara Falls in an inner tube. Because I have fallen, irreparably for Gavin Murphy — Lex Martin

I myself have seen this woman draw the stars from the sky; she diverts the course of a fast-flowing river with her incantations; her voice makes the earth gape, it lures the spirits from the tombs, send the bones tumbling from the dying pyre. At her behest, the sad clouds scatter; at her behest, snow falls from a summer's sky. — Tibullus

Time keeps ticking away, unaware of the suffering each second generates. Time doesn't care, because if it did, it would've reversed. — Laura Kreitzer

Just in case you're wondering," Gage says, breaking the silence, "this alliance of ours doesn't mean I like you."
"Feeling's mutual." Julian tosses him a disdainful look. — Laura Kreitzer

When friends come to Rome in early summer to visit me I like to take them to the Pantheon during thunderstorms and stand them beneath the opening of the feathery, perfectly proportioned dome as rain falls through the open roof against the marble floor and lightning scissors through the wild and roiled skies. The emperor Hadrian rebuilt the temple to honor gods no longer worshiped, but you can feel the brute passion in that ardor in the Pantheon's grand and harmonious shape. I think gods have rarely been worshiped so well. — Pat Conroy

God knows," Charpentier said, "I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours."
"Reform?" Camille said. "I'm not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer. — Hilary Mantel

If this is my final moment," she says, "then I can die happy."
"Is that why you're saying all this? Because you think we're going to die?"
"I don't know," she admits.
"Dammit, Summer." He clings to her waist, grip desperate, eyes heavy with torment. "You're saying everything I want to hear, but I don't know if I can trust it. — Laura Kreitzer

Winter Song The browns, the olives, and the yellows died, And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide, And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed. From off your face, into the winds of winter, The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing; But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter, When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing, And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going. — Wilfred Owen

Now summer is in flower and natures hum
Is never silent round her sultry bloom
Insects as small as dust are never done
Wi' glittering dance and reeling in the sun
And green wood fly and blossom haunting bee
Are never weary of their melody
Round field hedge now flowers in full glory twine
Large bindweed bells wild hop and streakd woodbine
That lift athirst their slender throated flowers
Agape for dew falls and for honey showers
These round each bush in sweet disorder run
And spread their wild hues to the sultry sun. — John Clare

June falls asleep upon her bier of flowers;
In vain are dewdrops sprinkled o'er her,
In vain would fond winds fan her back to life,
Her hours are numbered on the floral dial. — Lucy Larcom

The windflower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hills the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sunflower by the brook, in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the first from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland glade and glen. — William C. Bryant

The effect of climate change is not simply to reduce rain during the summer months, but also to increase the number of torrential storms. When the rain falls that hard and fast, it cannot sink into the ground and go down to the aquifers. — Nick Davies

AUTUMNAL

Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer's loss
Seems little, dear! on days like these.

Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time's deceit.

Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees. — Ernest Dowson

Father's face was buried in early summer flowers. There was something gruesome about the utter freshness of those flowers. It was as though they were peering down into the bottom of a well. For a dead man's face falls to an infinite depth beneath the surface which the face possessed when it was alive, leaving nothing for the survivors to see but the frame of a mask; it falls so deep, indeed, that it can never be pulled back to the surface. A dead man's face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay hands on the way in which this substance exists. — Yukio Mishima

A layer of fine powder coats his skin.
"My lungs are turning to concrete," Rob wheezes, hacking and spitting.
"So are my eyes. How do I always get roped into these things?" Avery coughs and pats Rob's back in sympathy. A poof of dust billows from the contact. — Laura Kreitzer