Where Is The Summer Quotes & Sayings

Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the summer rains. Picture it in two dimensions on a map, overlaid with a web of shipping channels and telegraph cables and inscribed with lines of distance. Now imagine the sea as a mental map: as a family tree of cousins, uncles, sisters, sons, connected by letters and journeys and stories. Think of it as a sea of debt, bound by advances and loans and obligations. Picture the Bay of Bengal even where it is absent - deep in the Malaysian jungle, where Hindu shrines sprout from the landscape as if washed up by the sea, left behind. — Sunil S. Amrith

How we delight to build our recollections upon some basis of reality,
a place, a country, a local habitation! how the events of life, as we look back upon them, have grown into the well-remembered background of the places where they fell upon us! Here is some sunny garden or summer lane, beautified and canonized forever, with the flood of a great joy; and here are dim and silent places,
rooms always shadowed and dark to us, whatever they may be to others,
where distress or death came once, and since then dwells forevermore. — Washington Irving

Earthly love is a brief and penurious stream, which only flows in spring, with a long summer drought. The change from a burning desert, treeless, springless, drear, to green fields and blooming orchards in June, is slight in comparison with that from the desert of this world's affection to the garden of God, where there is perpetual, tropical luxuriance of blessed love. — Henry Ward Beecher

Why I Am Happy
Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.
I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.
And I know where it is. — William Stafford

People were always saying how ugly Southern California was, especially when they came back from their summer vacations. They said it looked plastic or fake or whatever, and talked about all the cool things they saw in Ohio, where their grandparents lived. Or in Pennsylvania. The wall behind the arcade was made of giant sparkling white bricks, just like all the other buildings connected to it. There was graffiti on it, indecipherable gang writing. It was dark now and getting a little cold and then the super-bright lights they have behind stores to keep bums from sleeping by the dumpsters came on, and I thought, people who don't think Southern California is the most beautiful place in the world are idiots and I hope they choke on their tongues. — John Darnielle

That summer, maybe for the first time in my life, I existed wholly in the present moment, which is one of the liberating things about traveling to a place where no one knows you. I had no past or future, which suited me perfectly, since I did not wish to reckon with either. — Rachel Friedman

In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We looked the other way. We spoke of everything but. But we've always known, and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more. We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only. — Jamie O'Neill

A day out of season, stopping the monotonous count of summer days. Stopping, too, one's own summer routine, so that, looking out on the gray skies, one says not only, 'What time of year is it?' but, 'What time of life am I in? Where am I? What am I doing? — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Shigure:"A summer home like this by the lake, you half expect JASON to show up!"
Yuki: "There he goes again ... "
Kyo: (Thinking to himself) Jieison ... Jaysun? Now where have I heard that before?
Shigure: "'Jason' is a new species of bear. You're so ignorant, Kyo-Kun."
Kyo: "SHUT UP! I KNEW THAT!!"
Hatori:"That's not it ... "
Tohru:"Is it a foreign kind of bear?"
Hatori:" ... — Natsuki Takaya

What do you know? This is where it all began," he said.
"Began?"
"This is exactly where I was when I wanted to kiss you," he whispered, his lips brushing along my neck causing me to melt under his touch. "So bad."
"Except this time there's no drunk netballer squawking at us," I teased.
"I wouldn't care if the seven horseman of the Apocalypse charged through the garden right now, nothing's gonna stop me from doing this." He leaned down and captured my lips with tenderness, a completely perfect kiss, like it always was. — C.J. Duggan

The Carmel is a lovely little river. It isn't very long but in its course it has everything a river should have. It ... tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, ... crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live ... In the winter, it becomes a torrent, ... and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in. — John Steinbeck

Asters

Asters - sweltering days

old adjuration/curse,

the gods hold the balance

for an uncertain hour.


Once more the golden flocks

of heaven, the light, the trim -

what is the ancient process

hatching under its dying wings?


Once more the yearned-for,

the intoxication, the rose of you -

summer leaned in the doorway

watching the swallows -


one more presentiment

where certainty is not hard to come by:

wing tips brush the face of the waters,

swallows sip speed and night. — Gottfried Benn

In spite of all the farmer's work and worry, he can't reach down to where the seed is slowly transmuted into summer. The earth bestows. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I have named the star Jack's Star. It is beautiful and bright and gives me joy when it is here and pain when it is not, and every year as Summer approaches I have seen it coming over the hills. I used to think that someday i will learn what educated people have called it and why it is only here sometimes, but now i think it wouldn't matter. It is Jack's Star, and they only have to ask and I will tell them it's name. They will have to ask the star itself where it goes and why it is not content to stay. — Nancy E. Turner

In 1992, as we sought to establish our permanent terrestrial campus, we put out an RFP (request for proposals) that basically said, "Hi there, we're ISU. We have this concept for a permanent campus. We've held five summer programs in five different cities, and this is our vision for what we want to create and where we want to go. Please tell us how much cash endowment, buildings, and operational money you will give us to bring our vision to your city." Had we gotten no response at all, I would not have been surprised. But that wasn't the case. Within six months, we received seven proposals ranging from $20 million to $50 million in funding, buildings, faculty, equipment, and even the promise of accreditation. In short, everything we needed to implement the next phase of ISU. — Peter H. Diamandis

This is the circus of Dr. Lao.
We show you things that you don't know.
We tell you of places you'll never go.
We've searched the world both high and low
To capture the beasts for this marvelous show
From mountains where maddened winds did blow
To islands where zephyrs breathed sweet and low.
Oh, we've spared no pains and we've spared no dough;
And we've dug at the secrets of long ago;
And we've risen to Heaven and plunged Below,
For we wanted to make it one hell of a show.
And the things you'll see in your brains will glow
Long past the time when the winter snow
Has frozen the summer's furbelow.
For this is the circus of Dr. Lao.
And youth may come and age may go;
But no more circuses like this show! — Charles Grandison Finney

On my show, I'm definitely the youngest one. So going from a show where everyone is over 30, to the movie, where everyone was like 20, 25, it was like summer camp. — Marla Sokoloff

This is one other thing I know: without autumn, there is no end. Without red and gold and orange there is no finality, no conclusion. Without the sudden shift in the air, without the scent of apples and the crisp chill of morning, summer could go on forever. Without fall, summer lingers. There is a marvelous limbo where I live now, without the changing of seasons. No blazing display to signify the end of everything good. Perhaps this is what drew me to California. A place where time is suspended. — T. Greenwood

I focus on my favorite daydream, the one where I return from London at the end of the summer and am all glamorous and drop-dead gorgeous and every girl in my school is completely jealous when Quinn McKeyan asks me to Fall Homecoming because he can't resist my charm.
Hey, it's my daydream. I can dream what I want to.
The thing is, Quinn's face keeps getting replaced in my head by Dante's.
Since I've had a mad crush on Quinn from the time we started kindergarten all the way through our junior year last year, that's saying something.
Every daydream I've had for eleven years has been of him. I'm a very loyal daydreamer. And I suddenly feel like I'm cheating on my imaginary boyfriend, a boy who happens to be real, but who has been dating my best friend Becca for the past two years. And no. Becca has no idea that I'm secretly in love with her boyfriend. It's the one secret that I've kept from her. — Courtney Cole

Where's the trail to Cold Mountain?

Cold Mountain? There's no clear way.

Ice, in summer, is still frozen.

Bright sun shines through thick fog.

You won't get there following me.

Your heart and mine are not the same.

If your heart was like mine,

You'd have made it, and be there! — Han-shan

Digital Chocolate has 60% of its developers in Finland where the sun never sets in the summer and there is nothing to do outside in the winter, so we are very productive! — Trip Hawkins

Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! ... It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water. — Malcolm Lowry

Storage is important. Whether it's cushions you only use outside in the summer, or blankets that only come out in the winter, you've always got to think of where to store them. — Anthea Turner

The idea of fairyland fascinates me because it's one of those things, like mermaids and dragons, that doesn't really exist, but everyone knows about it anyway. Fairyland lies only in the eye of the beholder who is usually a fabricator of fantasy. So what good is it, this enchanted, fickle land which in some tales bodes little good to humans and, in others, is the land of peace and perpetual summer where everyone longs to be? Perhaps it's just a glimpse of our deepest wishes and greatest fears, the farthest boundaries of our imaginations. We go there because we can; we come back because we must. What we see there becomes our tales. — Patricia A. McKillip

In this part of California, there is no fall or spring. Summer drops right into winter, into summer, back and forth. Our idea of autumn is October, where the leaves rapidly go from green to gold to on-the-ground, and it's suddenly freezing. — Kelley York

Every life has a soundtrack.
There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There's another that reminds me of tagging along with my father on Sunday morning to pick up the New York Times. There's the song that reminds me of using fake ID to get into a nightclub; and the one that brings back my cousin Isobel's sweet sixteen, where I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a boy whose breath smelled like tomato soup.
If you ask me, music is the language of memory. — Jodi Picoult

Dr. Tucker Mayfield, the chief scientist at Yellowstone, glances at the clock and cringes. He had promised lunch with his brother's family, but that was before the current earthquake swarm threw a wrench into his plans. Tucker is tall and husky like his brother, and they share the same eye color, blue, but that's where the similarity ends. Tucker's hair is dark and, while Matt's skin often burns with sun exposure, Tucker's darkens to a deep tan during the summer months. — Tim Washburn

A great tree develops over time and can tell stories not only those of happiness, but also those that contain pain from what it has seen over the years, and as a result is the wise ancient tree that it is today. As the seasons change, the tree naturally goes through changes as well: where the leaves turn yellow and orange in the fall, falling by the Winter, returning in the Spring, and with full set of new leafs by the Summer. Love is no different in that there will be times when we are fully naked in the Winter, and left to wonder about Spring when it seemed so easy to love, yet the wise tree knows that no winter will last forever no matter how cold it may be. — Forrest Curran

She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one's childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by. — Shirley Jackson

We went far down the garden to the farthest end, where the children and the nurse and the puppy and I used to play in the summer in the shade of a great elm, and there the footman dug a hole, and I saw he was going to plant the puppy, and I was glad, because it would grow and come up a fine handsome dog, like Robin Adair, and be a beautiful surprise for the family when they came home; so I tried to help him dig, but my lame leg was no good, being stiff, you know, and you have to have two, or it is no use. When the footman had finished and covered little Robin up, he patted my head, and there were tears in his eyes, and he said: Poor little doggie, you saved HIS child! — Mark Twain

Summer is the worst time of all to be alone. The earth is warm and lovely, free to go about in; and always somewhere in the distance there is a place where two people might be happy if only they were together. It is in the spring that one dreams of such places; one thinks of the summer which is coming, and the heart dreams of its friend. — Robert Nathan

THE MOCKINGBIRD All summer the mockingbird in his pearl-gray coat and his white-windowed wings flies from the hedge to the top of the pine and begins to sing, but it's neither lilting nor lovely, for he is the thief of other sounds - whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges plus all the songs of other birds in his neighborhood; mimicking and elaborating, he sings with humor and bravado, so I have to wait a long time for the softer voice of his own life to come through. He begins by giving up all his usual flutter and settling down on the pine's forelock then looking around as though to make sure he's alone; then he slaps each wing against his breast, where his heart is, and, copying nothing, begins easing into it as though it was not half so easy as rollicking, as though his subject now was his true self, which of course was as dark and secret as anyone else's, and it was too hard - perhaps you understand - to speak or to sing it to anything or anyone but the sky. — Mary Oliver

Childhood is a time for pretending and trying on maturity to see if it fits or hangs baggy, tastes good or bitter, smells nice or fills your lungs with smoke that makes you cough. It's sharing licks on the same sucker with your best friend before you discover germs. It's not knowing how much a house cost, and caring less. It's going to bed in the summer with dirty feet on clean sheets. It's thinking anyone over fifteen is 'ancient'. It's absorbing ideas, knowledge, and people like a giant sponge. Childhood is where 'competition' is a baseball game and 'responsibility' is a paper route. — Erma Bombeck

I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time, and I wish I could say: I did this five years ago. I made this mark, this ring caused by a wet coffee cup, this cigarette burn, this ladder of cuts against the wood's coarse grain. This is where Anouk carved her initials, the year she was six years old, this secret place behind the table leg. I did this on a warm day seven summers ago with the carving knife. Do you remember? Do you remember the summer the river ran dry? Do you remember? I envy the table's calm sense of place. It has been here a long time. It belongs. — Joanne Harris

I love weather. I'm a connoisseur of weather. Wherever my travels take me, the first thing I do is turn on the weather channel and see what's going on, what's coming. I like to know about regional weather patterns, how storms are created in different altitudes, what kinds of clouds are forming or dissipating or blowing through, where the winds are coming from, where they've been. That's not a passion everybody shares, I know, but I don't believe there are any people on earth who, properly sheltered, don't feel the peace inside a summer rain and the cleansing it brings, the renewal of the earth in its aftermath. — Johnny Cash

In Sacramento it is fiery summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner Lake...There is transition for you! Where will you find another like it in the western hemisphere? — Mark Twain

What Gosta,' he said to himself, 'can you no longer endure? You have been hardened in poverty all of your life; you have heard every tree in the forest, every tuft in the meadows preach to you of sacrifice and patience. You, brought up in a country where the winter is severe, and the summer joy is very short, have you forgotten the art of bearing your trials?
'Oh Gosta, a man must bear all that life gives him with a courageous heart and a smile on his lips, else he is no man. Sorrow as much as you will. If you love your beloved, let your conscience burn and chafe within you, but show yourself a man and a Varmlander. Let your glances beam with joy, and meet your friends with a gay word on your lips! Life and nature are hard. They bring forth courage and joy as a counterweight against their own hardness, or no one could endure them ... — Selma Lagerlof

Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun. Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, 'Never! Never!' — Tecumseh

Oh, father's gone to market-town, he was up before the day,
And Jamie's after robins, and the man is making hay,
And whistling down the hollow goes the boy that minds the mill,
While mother from the kitchen door is calling with a will,
"Polly!-Polly!-
The cows are in the corn!
Oh, where's Polly?" — Richard Watson Gilder

Going to make the time we have together unforgettable. I'm going to fuse you to me, so that there is no way of knowing where the separation between you and me begins - or even if there is one. I'm going to fill this summer with us, so that when you look back on it, all you remember is me, and when I look back on it, all I remember is you. I'm going to put as much life into now as I can. Like you did for me. Now it's my turn. — Lindy Zart

At a Negro summer school two years ago, a white instructor gave a course on the Negro, using for his text a work which teaches that whites are superior to the blacks. When asked by one of the students why he used such a textbook the instructor replied that he wanted them to get that point of view. Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority. The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies. If he happens to leave school after he masters the fundamentals, before he finishes high school or reaches college, he will naturally escape some of this bias and may recover in time to be of service — Carter G. Woodson

I want so badly to help you realize, Elizabeth Anne, how difficult and puzzling and full of wonder it all is: some day I will tell you how I learned to watch the shifting light of autumn days or smelled the earth through snow in March; how one winter morning God vanished from my life and how one summer evening I sat in a Ferris wheel, looking down on a man that hurt me badly; I will tell you how I once travelled to Rome and saw all the soldiers in that city of dead poets; I will tell you how I met your father outside a movie house in Toronto, and how you came to be. Perhaps that is where I will begin. On a winter afternoon when we turn the lights on early, or perhaps a summer day of leaves and sky, I will begin by conjugating the elemental verb. I am. You are. It is. — Richard B. Wright

Don't you want to take a last look at the place?" he asked Hedwig, who was still sulking with her head under her wing. "We'll never be here again. Don't you want to remember all the good times? I mean, look at this doormat. What memories . . . Dudley puked on it after I saved him from the dementors . . . Turns out he was grateful after all, can you believe it? . . . And last summer, Dumbledore walked through that front door . . . ."
Harry lost the thread of his thoughts for a moment and Hedwig did nothing to help him retrieve it, but continued to sit with her head under her wing. Harry turned his back on the front door.
"And under here, Hedwig" - Harry pulled open a door under the stairs - "is where I used to sleep! You never knew me then - Blimey, it's small, I'd forgotten . . . . — J.K. Rowling

Cause this place is a home away from home where you can forget about all that painful stuff and just be yourself with the people who, like, truly get - or at least truly want to get - who you are. — Stacy Davidowitz

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII
Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.
Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.
Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?
Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity. — Anna Quindlen

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

Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past. — John Darnielle

On the first day of May the people of the crofter townland are up betimes and busy as bees about to swarm. This is the day of migrating, bho baile gu beinn (from townland to moorland), from the winter homestead to the summer sheiling. The summer of their joy is come, the summer of the sheiling, the song, the pipe and the dance, when the people ascend the hill to the clustered bothies, overlooking the distant sea from among the fronded ferns and fragrant heather, where neighbour meets neighbour, and lover meets lover. — Alexander Carmichael

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

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

I LIKE WHEN YOU WALK far enough that a kind of relaxation happens and you can be inside the rhythm of your feet. Your brain shifts like a car; you settle down, look around, and feel ah. In a more slow-motion way, you see where you are. And where I am is outside and free, on a summer day. There are times you know — Elizabeth Berg

He sighed, then said, "So basically, you're stalking her."
"I am NOT stalking her." I insisted.
"That's where you come in. If I followed her by myself, someone who did not understand the situation and did not realize that I am so responsible-"
McGillicuddy snorted.
"- might mistake what I am doing for stalking.
However, her big brother is with me. Therefore we are protecting her. — Jennifer Echols

Tell me about yourself."
"Myself?" He looks confused.
"Yes," I say, patting the mattress.
"You know all there is to know," he says, sitting beside me.
"Not true," I say. "Where were you born? What's your favourite season? Anything."
"Here. Florida," he says. "I remember a woman in a red dress with curly brown hair. Maybe she was my mother, I'm not sure. And summer. What about you?" The last part is said with a smile. He smiles so infrequently that I consider each one a trophy. — Lauren DeStefano

You are mad to be spending the summer in the country, where the days are too quiet and you have so much time to think. In the city you live on Broadway, where the noise is so thick your scary thoughts can't get a word in edgewise. But here in the county, there is only space. On the stone bridge by the stream. On the mossy rock at the edge of the yard. Behind the abandoned trailer where Art, the old man with the glass eye, used to live. Space, space, space, and you can scare yourself into thinking your thoughts are more like voices. — Lena Dunham

Another part of Bit's unifying urban theory is sprinklers, that you can gauge a neighborhood's wealth by the way people water. If every house has an automatic system, you're looking at a six-figure mean. If the majority lug hoses around, it's more lower-middle class. And if they don't bother with the lawns ... well, that's the sort of shitburg where Bit and Julie always lived, except for that little place they rented in Wenatchee the summer Bit worked at the orchard. — Jess Walter

There is no part of the country where in the summer you cannot get a sufficient supply of the best specimens. Teach your children to bring them in for themselves. Take your text from the brooks, not from the booksellers. — Louis Agassiz

I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter.
Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned's little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue. — George R R Martin

A story in a book has its own intentions, even if unknowable to the virgin reader, who just lollops along at her own pace regardless of the author's strategies, and gets where she will. After all, a book can be set aside for weeks, or for good. (Burned in the grate.) Alternatively, a story can be adored for centuries. But it cannot be derailed. A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. It is progressive and inevitable as the seasons. Winter still comes after autumn though you may have died over the summer. — Gregory Maguire

It doesn't take a farm to invoke the iron taste of leaving in your mouth. Anyone who loves a small plot of ground - a city garden, a vacant lot with some guerilla beds, a balcony of pots - understands the almost physical hurt of parting from it, even for a minor stint. I hurt every day I wake up in our city bed, wondering how the light will be changing over the front field or across the pond, whether the moose will be in the willow by the cabin again, if the wren has fledged her young ones yet and we'll return to find the box untended. I can feel where the farm is at any point in my day, not out of some arcane sixth sense developed from years of summer nights out there with the coyotes under the stars, but because of the bond between that earth and this body. Some grounds we choose; some are our instinctive homes. — Jenna Butler

It seems to me that when you look back at a life - yours or another's - what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow. So much is lost. What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses. Our histories, like my father's current body, are structures built of toothpicks. So what I recall of that last summer in New Bremen is a construct of both what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see. — William Kent Krueger

Beneath our feet a fairy pathway flows, The grass still glitters in the summer breeze, The dusky wood, and distant copse appear, And that lone stream, upon whose chequer'd face We mused, when noon-rays made the pebbles gleam, Is mirror'd to the mind: though all around Be rattling hoofs and roaring wheels, the eye Is wand'ring where the heart delights to dwell. — Robert Montgomery

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer
and what trees and seasons smelled like
how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich. — John Steinbeck

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

The next morning, I woke up to hear Becky moaning and rustling around in her bed covers.
"I'm so itchy!" she cried.
"So scratch!" I said, groggily, but suddenly, I felt itchy too.
So, I started scratching my legs. They felt better until I stopped scratching. Then, it started to burn. I threw back the covers and saw that my legs were covered in red bumps.
"My legs!" I yelled.
Becky looked over at me. Then, she pulled back her covers. Her legs were even worse. She gasped.
"Mom!" I cried.
Mom came in. She was ready for work, wearing her dress shirt and gym shorts. She only had to dress up the top half of her body in case she had to use her webcam to talk to her boss.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Look!" I said, showing her our legs.
"Oh no! That's poison ivy!" she cried, "Where were you guys playing yesterday?"
"The woods," I said.
"You must have been sitting in it," she said.

- The Castle Park Kids — Laura Smith

After I took Lisa's braces off, we climbed out of my bedroom window onto the roof of the porch below, smoked cigarettes in our nightgowns, and talked about boys. If I had tried that summer to imagine what my future would look like, it would have been as much a mystery to me then as my own reflection in those cutoff shorts. This is what I understand now that I could not have seen then: When you grow up in a home where nobody goes to work, where nobody is married, in a place where there are few jobs and few opportunities, you do not stay up late whispering about weddings and college and careers. You live in that moment, or maybe in the next; you do not make decisions that will impact a future that you do not let yourself imagine; you do not make a plan beyond your next pack of cigarettes. — Heather Ross

Folk music is where I come from originally. The very first thing that introduced me to playing guitars at all was skiffle - my cousin had been in London the summer that skiffle was big. — Bjorn Ulvaeus

One thing we've learned this summer is that a house is not an end in itself, any more than "home" is just one geographic location where things feel safe and familiar. Home can be anyplace in which we create our own sense of rest and peace as we tend to the spaces in which we eat and sleep and play. It is a place that we create and re-create in every moment, at every stage of our lives, a place where the plain and common becomes cherished and the ordinary becomes sacred. — Katrina Kenison

The other nice thing about the robes is that they keep you cool in the summer, and we were filming sometimes in Rome, where it was sometimes over 100 degrees. — Jude Law

While snow the window-panes bedim,
The fire curls up a sunny charm,
Where, creaming o'er the pitcher's rim,
The flowering ale is set to warm;
Mirth, full of joy as summer bees,
Sits there, its pleasures to impart,
And children, 'tween their parent's knees,
Sing scraps of carols o'er by heart. — John Clare

One splendid summer afternoon Kaspar realized he had never been happier in his life or both of his lives, past and present. Not fireworks-orgasms-and-champagne happy, but on waking in the morning he was glad almost every single day to be exactly where he was. He had never before experienced the feeling of genuine, constant well-being and it was a true revelation. The longer the satisfaction continued, the less he thought about his previous life as a mechanic and the extraordinary things he'd once seen and been able to do. Misery may love company but happiness is content to be alone. The funny irony of his existence now was, as long as he was this happy and content with his lot, Kaspar didn't need to make much of an effort to "walk away" from his mechanic's life because now he was sated with this one both in mind and heart. — Jonathan Carroll

All ye young people now take my advice
Before crossing the ocean you'd better think twice
Cause you can't live without love, without love alone
The proof is round London in the nobody zone

Where the summer is fine, but the winter's a fridge
Wrapped up in old cardboard under Charing Cross Bridge
And I'll never go home now because of the shame
Of misfit's reflection in a shop window pane. — Christy Moore

There is a beautiful spirit breathing now Its mellowed richness on the clustered trees, And, from a beaker full of richest dyes, Pouring new glory on the autumn woods, And dipping in warm light the pillared clouds. Morn on the mountain, like a summer bird, Lifts up her purple wing, and in the vales The gentle wind, a sweet and passionate wooer, Kisses the blushing leaf, and stirs up life Within the solemn woods of ash deep-crimsoned, And silver beech, and maple yellow-leaved, Where Autumn, like a faint old man, sits down By the wayside a-weary. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In all places where there is a Summer and a Winter, and where your Gardens of pleasure are sometimes clothed with their verdant garments, and bespangled with variety of Flowers, and at other times wholly dismantled of all these; here to recompense the loss of past pleasures, and to buoy up their hopes of another Spring, many have placed in their Gardens, Statues, and Figures of several Animals, and great variety of other curious pieces of Workmanship, that their walks might be pleasant at any time in those places of never dying pleasures. — John Worlidge

The die was cast. It was a proud day for the Milligan family as I was taken from the house. "I'm too young to go," I screamed as Military Policemen dragged me from my pram, clutching a dummy. At Victoria Station the R.T.O. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked "This is your enemy." I searched every compartment, but he wasn't on the train. At 4.30, June 2nd, 1940, on a summer's day all mare's tails and blue sky we arrived at Bexhill-on-Sea, where I got off. It wasn't easy. The train didn't stop there. — Spike Milligan

Why don't I ask the questions?" he purrs. "What is your name?" "Anne of Green Gables," I say. "Where are you from?" he demands. "Canada. Where the moose live." "Give me real answers," he hisses. He no longer smiles. — Summer Lane

King Yorandt to Kristina in book three of Fracture the Secret Enemy Saga~Secrets
release date: Summer 2014

Even the master does not play perfectly. He can only hope to make fewer mistakes than his opponent, and that in the end, he is the victor. Sajah (chess) is a ruthless game where the pieces are all pawns and the Queen is the true killer.
She spares no one to protect the king. The king however, is ruled by all of the pieces that lay before him, even his opponent. Every move is a decision that can change the whole board, and the endgame. — Virginia McKevitt

Essex raised its ugly head. When i was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this country was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house. I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes - a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker - varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it alone the Say. Sticklebacks in jars,. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get? — David Mitchell

Inevitably I came to associate any wine I met with a specific place and a particular slant of history. I learned to perceive more than could be deduced from an analysis of the physical elements in the glass. For me, an important part of the pleasure of wine is its reflection of the total environment that produced it. If I find in a wine no hint of where it was grown, no mark of the summer when the fruit ripened, and no indication of the usages common among those who made it, I am frustrated and disappointed. Because that is what a good, honest wine should offer. — Gerald Asher

My sister lived in the moment. She said she would love the summer only when it came and warmed her. But I lived and still live in the future. Where it's warm when it's cold. Where dreams are not yet reality. Where the sad people are happy. The only problem with living in the future is that everyone has died, including yourself. So your plans are fiction and your predictions are fantasy. Living in the future is pure fantasy. I think that's why I love it so dearly. — F.K. Preston

Possibly the best thing about the whole experience is that Kang and I are now really good friends. It's as much of a pleasure and privilege to know her as a person as it is to translate her work. She's been over for two UK publicity tours, which means lots of time to chat on trains etc., and she was hear all last summer for a writer's residency in Norwich, where I got to meet her son too. — Deborah Smith

Let me begin with a heartfelt confession.
I admit it. I am a biblioholic, one who loves books and whose life would seem incomplete without them. I am an addict, with a compulsive need to stop by nearly any bookstore I pass in order to get my fix. Books are an essential part of my life, the place where I have spent many unforgettable moments. For me, reading is one of the most enjoyable ways to pass a rainy afternoon or a leisurely summer day. I crave the knowledge and insights that truly great books bring into my life and can spend transported hours scouring used book stores for volumes which "I simply must have". I love the smell and feel of well-loved books and the look of a bookcase full of books waiting to be taken down and read. — Terry W. Glaspey

Where, twisted round the barren oak,
The summer vine in beauty clung,
And summer winds the stillness broke,
The crystal icicle is hung. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Love, in this world, is like a seed taken from the tropics, and planted where the winter comes too soon; and it cannot spread itself in flower-clusters and wide-twining vines, so that the whole air is filled with the perfume thereof. But there is to be another summer for it yet. Care for the root now, and God will care for the top by and by. — Henry Ward Beecher

But you said I had to spend some time with them!"
"A few hours, lad," Grandpa Smedry said, "to apologize for the trouble you'd given them. What did you expect? That I'd leave you here all summer, in the exact place where your enemies know where to look? With people that aren't even your family? In a place you don't really like, and that is depressingly normal compared to the world you've grown to love? Doesn't that sound a little stupid and contrived to you? — Brandon Sanderson

You have worked to build me what I asked for all the days of our lives. Even when the task seemed impossible, even when it would have been easier to give it up, you did not, but kept on going. You have kept me warm in winter, and cool in summer. You have laughed with me, and you have cried. You have given me children who are almost, but not quite, my greatest joy.
For the greatest joy of all is the way you held my wish in the center of your heart thorough all the days of our lives. That is where the room that you have built for me lies. Just as the room I built for you lies within mine. And in this way have all our wishes been granted. Together, we have made ourselves a home. — Cameron Dokey

Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,
But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.
And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head. — Emily Bronte

And in the summer we would line up three sand dollars John and I had found on our second date when we walked along the ocean holding hands, both of us taut with the knowledge the we had found The One- though neither of us admitted it until much later. It was the same beach where I scattered his ashes. It is good we don't know our own futures. — Elizabeth Berg

Memories are strange things. Withough being something I can hold in my hand, they wield a beguiling power over me. Like a mirage in the noontime heat of summer, they dance before my inner eyes and beckon me to find water where there is not water. — Joy Sikorski

He put one hand lightly on the back of her neck and simultaneously she placed one hand lightly on his hip, and they kissed in the street as all around them people hurried home in the summer light, and it was the sweetest kiss that either of them would ever know. This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today. And then it was over. — David Nicholls

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

Gone, gone again is Summer the lovely.
She that knew not where to hide,
Is gone again like a jeweled fish from the hand, Is lost on every side.
Mute,mute, I make way to the garden, Thither where she last was seen;
The heavy foot of the frost is on the flags there,
Where her light step has been.
Gone, gone again is Summer the lovely,
Gone again on every side,
Lost again like a shining fish from the hand Into the shadowy tide. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Answer July-
Where is the Bee-
Where is the Blush-
Where is the Hay?
Ah, said July-
Where is the Seed-
Where is the Bud-
Where is the May-
Answer Thee-Me- — Emily Dickinson

I suppose I'm happy when I know I've given a horse a good ride, no matter where it is. I like playing golf in the summer; I'm happy when I hit a good shot, and I enjoy watching Arsenal playing beautiful football, but overall I can't believe you can be happy when you're not winning. I honestly can't accept that. — Tony McCoy

I thought to myself then that it didn't matter where I ended up; I'd always be living that summer in that town, wishing that I;d done things differently, tormented by the fact that I hadn't. I'd never go far enough to be able to escape it. Maybe you're happy about that. OR maybe you're not. Maybe you're carrying your own regrets, and you understand how easy it is to let your life get away from you. I wish I could be the hero of this story, but I'm not. I'm just the one to tell it, at least my part in it- the story of Katie Mackey and the people who failed her. It's an old one, this tale of selfish desires and the lament that follows, as ancient as the story of Adam and Eve turned away forever from paradise. — Lee Martin

If you do not have - right now - an FAL, M1, M1A, or HK91, then there is something you have chosen not to own for your freedom. If you do own such a rifle but cannot - right now - from offhand position hit a dinner plate at 100yds within 5 seconds on demand without fail, then there is a skill you have chosen not to earn for your freedom. If you are not a Rifleman - right now - then you have announced to the world that your commitment to liberty goes only just so far. If you will not spend a summer and the price of a used jetski to become a Rifleman - to become a deadly foe of tyranny - then you are just mouthing platitudes, treating liberty as a hobby and expecting brave men to do your fighting for you. If you're not a Rifleman - you're just a hobbyist. By choosing to move to a state where you can't become a Rifleman, a hobbyist is what you'll remain. — Boston T. Party

How about that one? Is that a constellation?" I asked, pointing upward. We were down in the small valley where the truck was parked. Alex sat leaning against a rock; I was between his legs with my back against his chest, his arms around me as we stared up at the stars.
"Yeah, that's the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades." He bent his head, and I caught my breath as his warm mouth nuzzled at my neck. I hadn't gotten even remotely used yet to how good it felt to be kissed by Alex.
"It's so sexy how you know all of this," I said when I could speak again.
"Yeah?" I heard the grin in his voice. "I know the summer constellations, too. Will that get me bonus kisses?"
"I think it might, actually. — L.A. Weatherly

Where is the subject that does not branch out into infinity? For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snowflake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last. — William Mountford

I always wrote about girls that went to the beach and had that summer that changed everything. So I was interested in what it would be like to live in a tourist town where everyone has these life changing experiences, but your whole life is there. — Sarah Dessen

Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts already had set the marks of their galloping consumption on the cheek of the forest, giving warning of the time when the white plague of the winter would make a massacre of all this present glory and turn the trees to naked skeletons and stretch a bony bare cadaver on every steeper hillside to bleach there until the snows covered things up. But now the kindly nighttime had all signs and threats of approaching death, so that each shriveled speckled leaf, as revealed and traced in the waning light, seemed flawless - a perfect part of a perfect tapestry. — Irvin S. Cobb