Winter Came Quotes & Sayings

I wiped my hands on my apron and went to the window. Outside, the prairie reached out and touched the places where the sky came down. Though the winter was nearly over, there were patches of snow and ice everywhere. I looked at the long dirt road that crawled across the plains, remembering the morning that Mama had died, cruel and sunny. They had come for her in a wagon and taken her away to be buried. And then the cousins and aunts and uncles had come and tried to fill up the house. But they couldn't. — Patricia MacLachlan

The snow came up to the top of Georgie's calves - she had to lift her feet high to make any progress. Her ears and eyelids were freezing ... God, she'd never even been able to imagine this much cold before. How could people live someplace that so obviously didn't want them? — Rainbow Rowell

When the gray November weather came, and hung its soft dark clouds low and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed fields and the vivid emerald of the stretches of winter corn, the heavy stillness weighed my heart down to a forlorn yearning after the pleasant things of childhood, the petting, the comforting, the warming faith in the unfailing wisdom of the elders. A great need of something to lean on, and a great weariness of independence and responsibility took possession of my soul; and looking round for support and comfort in that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness of the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. — F Scott Fitzgerald

As the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came. — Daphne Du Maurier

Nico di Angelo came into Olympus to a hero's welcome, his father right behind him, despite the fact that Hades was only supposed to visit Olympus in winter solstice. The God of the dead looked stunned when his relatives clapped him on the back. I doubt he'd ever got such an enthusiastic welcome before. — Rick Riordan

The men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever. The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can't, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup. Yup. — Daniel Woodrell

Nights and days came and passed
and summer and winter
and the sun and the wind
and the rain.
and it was good to be a little island
a part of the world
and a world of its own
all surrounded by the bright blue sea. — Margaret Wise Brown

In the dull twilight of the winter afternoon she came to the end of a long road which had begun the night Atlanta fell. She had set her feet upon that road a spoiled, selfish and untried girl, full of youth, warm of emotion, easily bewildered by life. Now, at the end of the road, there was nothing left of that girl. Hunger and hard labor, fear and constant strain, the terrors of war and the terrors of Reconstruction had taken away all warmth and youth and softness. About the core of her being, a shell of hardness had formed and, little by little, layer by layer, the shell had thickened during the endless months. — Margaret Mitchell

When Richard Nixon came to Beijing in the winter of 1972, China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, so it had a limited array of entertainment to provide. — Evan Osnos

His smiles were hard won, but when they came, they were well worth it. They lit up his face like summer sunshine. The rest of the time, and far more frequently, he seemed lost in winter. And when he laughed, he was a different person. — Danielle Steel

Just let me wait a little while longer,
Under your window in the quite snow.
Let me stand here and shiver, I'll be stronger
If I can see your light before I go.
All through the weeks I've tried to keep my balance.
Leaves fell, then rain, then shadows, I fell too.
Easy restraint is not among my talents,
Fall turned to Winter and I came to you.
Kissed by the snow I contemplate your face.
Oh, do not hide it in your pillow yet!
Warm rooms would never lure me from this place,
If only I could see your silhouette.
Turn on your light, my sun, my summer love.
Zero degrees down here, July above. — Polly Shulman

It was the winter after Mother died, and Mrs. Corbett and some of the Brother's wives came to call. They kept bleating on about how sorry they were and my poor dear mother. It was infuriating. They didn't know Mother at all; she never liked any of them. They were just nosy, noisy sheep. — Jessica Spotswood

One day Lal shahbaz was wandering in the desert with his friend Sheikh Bhaa ud-Din Zakariya. It was winter, and evening time, so they began to build a fire to keep warm. They found some wood, but then they realised they had no fire. So Baha ud- Din suggested that Lal Shahbaz turn himself into a falcon and get fire from hell. Off he flew, but an hour later he came back empty handed. "There is no fire in hell," he reported. "Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world. — William Dalrymple

Now with the squadrons marshaled, captains leading each,
the Trojans came with cries and the din of war like wildfowl
when the long hoarse cries of cranes sweep on against the sky
and the great formations flee from winter's grim ungodly storms,
flying in force. shrieking south to the Ocean gulfs, speeding
blood and death to the Pygmy warriors, laonching at daybreak
savage battle down upon their heads. But Achaea's armies
came on strong in silence, breathing combat-fury,
hearts ablaze to defend each other to the death. — Fagles Robert

Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand. — George Steiner

With snow came the kites, once the rulers of Kabul's winter skies, now timid trespassers in territory claimed by streaking rockets and fighter jets. — Khaled Hosseini

Winter came to an end, and spring arrived, in its fully glory. I remember looking at the blooming trees and flowers and thinking of how incongruous is the beauty of nature against the ugliness of man. — Henry Orenstein

The Depression, by the time it came, ratified what'd been under way. Slothrop grew up in a hilltop desolation of businesses going under, hedges around the estates of the vastly rich, half-mythical cottagers from New York lapsing back now to green wilderness or straw death, all the crystal windows every single one smashed, Harrimans and Whitneys gone, lawns growing to hay, and the autumns no longer a time for foxtrots in the distances, limousines and lamps, but only the accustomed crickets again, apples again, early frosts to send the hummingbirds away, east wind, October rain: only winter certainties. — Thomas Pynchon

Grasping the staff, Donia pressed her mouth to Beira's still body and inhaled. The rest of the Winter Queen's cold flowed into her, rolling through her like an icy wave, churning until it suddenly stopped and lay quiet - a fathomless frozen pool surrounded by ice-laden trees and unmarred white fields.
The words came to her from the white world, sliding through her lips like a winter wind, "I am the Winter Queen. As those before me, I will carry the wind and ice."
And she was healed, stronger than she'd ever been. — Melissa Marr

He came back to the car, long legs lifting high in the snow, and there was snow in his hair and on his eyelashes and I remembered that I love him. It felt like something breaking with a little pain and spilling warm. — Thomas Harris

Where I lived - winter and hard earth.
I sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,
to break the ice. My broken heart -
I tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.
She came from a long, long way,
but I saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,
In bare feet, bringing all spring's flowers
to her mother's house. I swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,
the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon. — Carol Ann Duffy

She thanked God that life was not always winter, that spring always came at last to chase away the cold and heaviness, and to release one to warmth and movement again. — Janette Oke

She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became cold and short and dark. Living things hid themselves away. Spring came when she was released and made her slow way up to the world again. The world became brighter and bolder in order to welcome her back. It began to be filled with warmth and light. The animals dared to wake, they dared to have their young. Plants dared to send out buds and shoots. Life dared to come back. — David Almond

Watanabe beat POWs every day, fracturing their windpipes, rupturing their eardrums, shattering their teeth, tearing one man's ear half off, leaving men unconscious. He made one officer sit in a shack, wearing only a fundoshi undergarment, for four days in winter. He tied a sixty-five-year-old POW to a tree and left him there for days. He ordered one man to report to him to be punched in the face every night for three weeks. He practiced judo on an appendectomy patient. When gripped in the ecstasy of an assault, he wailed and howled, drooling and frothing, sometimes sobbing, tears running down his cheeks. Men came to know when an outburst was imminent: Watanabe's right eyelid would sag a moment before he snapped. — Laura Hillenbrand

When we came in she had her chair sideways, without even looking up to know that it was us, that the doctors had said that sitting and staring at the snow was a waste of time; she should get involved in something. She laughed and told us it wasn't a waste of time. It would be a waste of time just to stare at snowflakes, but she was counting, and even that might be a waste of time, but she was only counting the ones that were just alike — Ann Beattie

Anne came dancing home in the purple winter twilight across the snowy places. — L.M. Montgomery

He had no idea where the stereotype of dumb giggly blondes came from. Ever since he'd met Annabeth at the Grand Canyon last winter,when she'd marched toward him with that Give me Percy Jackson or I'll kill you expression, Leo had thought of blondes as much too smart and much too dangerous. — Rick Riordan

Full knee-deep lies the winter snow,
And the winter winds are wearily sighing:
Toll ye the church bell sad and slow,
And tread softly and speak low,
For the old year lies a-dying.
Old year you must not die;
You came to us so readily,
You lived with us so steadily,
Old year you shall not die. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Spring came late. For the children, shut in the dark, cold parsonage, adjusting to Aunt and getting over the death that brought her, the winter had seemed endless. But now the rough moor was flecked with racing cloud shadows; the maltreated holly tree had stopped weeping; the green mould on the graves had dried to an unsuggestive grey.
The church could never look cheerful. It was too black, and its voice, the bell, always said 'Fu - ner -al ... fu - ner- al ... ' even when it was only calling them to hear one of their Papa's dramatic sermons. — Lynne Reid Banks

In my dream, spring came after summer, came after fall, came after winter, came after spring. — Jonathan Safran Foer

He loved the interminable winter nights, when the dissatisfied wind mewed through the keyhole, and gusts of acrid smoke were driven down through the chimney; the imperfect silence when you awoke, as of a conversation hastily lulled, objects being hastily replaced. 'Blow, blow thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude.' Why was it that he felt so perfectly attuned to winter, to its fatalistic expectation of the worst, then, when the worst came, its rustic heroisms and shouldering of burdens, improvised ingeniousness, constructive despair? — Violet Trefusis

Much has been said of the aesthetic values of chanoyu- the love of the subdued and austere- most commonly characterized by the term, wabi. Wabi originally suggested an atmosphere of desolation, both in the sense of solitariness and in the sense of the poverty of things. In the long history of various Japanese arts, the sense of wabi gradually came to take on a positive meaning to be recognized for its profound religious sense ... the related term, sabi, ... It was mid-winter, and the water's surface was covered with the withered leaves of the of the lotuses. Suddenly I realized that the flowers had not simply dried up, but that they embodied, in their decomposition, the fullness of life that would emerge again in their natural beauty. — Okakura Kakuzo

I count a hundred steps and start again. My da used to say it's good to test your limits now and then, learn what the body is capable of, what you can endure. He said this when we were in the throes of sickness on the Agnes Pauline, and again in the bitter first winter in New York, when four of us, including Mam, came down with pneumonia. Test your limits. Learn what you can endure. I am doing that. — Christina Baker Kline

I remember a time in a class on a cold winter morning a Japanese girl came with a surgical mask & I thought "wow people would go to extremes NOT to get sick in Japan" afterwards on a break I approached her & asked in a cynical manner: why the mask? Are you afraid of catching a cold? & then she said "in Japan you use it when YOU are under the weather & you don't want other people to get sick, it is the polite thing to do" wow! that's a lesson I will never forget — Pablo

The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year. — James Baldwin

An Elegy, Years After Sarah"

So her ceiling a map of stars. First time we made love
late afternoon late winter, and after she slept
how her room fogged up with dusk
and paper stars she'd stuck up there in childhood
came out in strange constellations
and I missed the earth
till her room was night her breath deepening the stars
cooling down: I said come closer and her eyes
- half-open, flashing back whatever light there was - went out. — Steven Heighton

It was one of those sneaky days in late winter where spring came along to get a lay of the land. — Dennis Lehane

Autumn came, and the leaves in the forest turned to orange and gold. Then, as winter approached, the wind caught them as they fell — Hans Christian Andersen

Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when ... — Pablo Neruda

(...)

That winter you left me snow-blind trying to find enough details that would let you know that even though some people have perfect sight,
those same people could try to paint you by numbers and they still wouldn't get you right.
You were Monet number two and Van Gogh number 6,
a mix tape of Hendrix and Leibowitz portraits.

It makes no sense to me that we were ever together.
And my makeshift weather reports were the closest I ever came to telling you how I felt.
But you were a lover of the minuscule,
you dealt best with details.
Weighing our relationship on scales you balanced us out, and always made me feel needed.

You always asked me what to wear,
and I would stare at you as if for a second I wouldn't answer.
Of course, I always did.
Hid my affections, and my response:
"wear that smile" I said.
That one you wear when you see me.
That one you wear to bed. — Shane L. Koyczan

Dream of the Tundra Swan

Dusk fell
and the cold came creeping,
cam prickling into our hearts.
As we tucked beaks
into feathers and settled for sleep,
our wings knew.

That night, we dreamed the journey:
ice-blue sky and the yodel of flight,
the sun's pale wafer,
the crisp drink of clouds.
We dreamed ourselves so far aloft
that the earth curved beneath us
and nothing sang but
a whistling vee of light.

When we woke, we were covered with snow.
We rose in a billow of white. — Joyce Sidman

Man, where did fall go? It's like winter came out of nowhere and bitch smacked us.""I know." I shuddered as we stopped at the intersection.
"I feel sorry for the kids who are about to go trick or treating tomorrow night. They're going to freeze." "Fuck the kids," she said, causing me to giggle. "I'm dressing as an angel - a slutty angel."
"Of course."
"And that means I'm basically wearing lingerie. My nipples will probably freeze and fall off.Speaking of which, don't think I haven't noticed how you've been avoiding the whole party topic."
I had no idea how she went from frozen nipples to that. — J. Lynn

Summer was felt a little more;
in autumn I began to fall.
When winter came with all its white,
you were mine to kiss good night. — Lang Leav

There must be some kind of internal time distortion effect in here, because when I look at myself in the little mirror above my sink, what I see is my father's face, my face turning into his. I am beginning to feel how the man looked, especially how he looked on those nights he came home so tired he couldn't even make it through dinner without nodding off, sitting there with his bowl of soup cooling in front of him, a rich pork-and-winter-melon-saturated broth that, moment by moment, was losing - or giving up - its tiny quantum of heat into the vast average temperature of the universe. — Charles Yu

Perrin told me about his people before I ever came here," she said. He was not a man to brag, but things had a way of coming out. "When hail flattens your crops, when the winter kills half your sheep, you buckle down and keep going. When Trollocs devastated the Two Rivers, you fought back, and when you were done with them, you set about rebuilding without missing a step." She would not have believed that without seeing for herself, not of southerners. These people would have done very well in Saldaea, where Trolloc raids were a matter of course, in the northern parts at least. "I cannot tell you the weather will be what it should tomorrow. I can tell you that Perrin and I will do what needs to be done, whatever can be done. And I don't need to tell you that you will take what each day brings, whatever it is, and be ready to face the next. That is the kind of people the Two Rivers breeds. That is who you are. — Robert Jordan

During seventy years of TV, the audience came to feel that the rules are, you can't kill the second lead on your TV show! Whatever's going to happen, it's all okay because there's no way they can kill the star. — Terence Winter

March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine. — L.M. Montgomery

Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. — Norman Mailer

Once upon a time there was a bear and a bee who lived in a wood and were the best of friends. All summer long the bee collected nectar from morning to night while the bear lay on his back basking in the long grass. When winter came the bear realised he had nothing to eat and thought to himself 'I hope that busy little bee will share some of his honey with me.' But the bee was nowhere to be found - he had died of a stress induced coronary disease. — Banksy

The rainy winter days passed quickly. Thanksgiving came and not long afterward Christmas vacation. Ramona missed Daisy, who went with her family to visit her grandparents. When she returned, the girls spent an afternoon dressing up Roberta in the clothes she had received for Christmas. Roberta was agreeable to having a dress pulled over her head, her arms stuffed into a sweater, her head shoved into caps. She enjoyed the girls' admiration. She was not so happy about a pair of crocheted slippers with ears and tails that looked like rabbits, a gift from Howie's grandmother, who enjoyed crocheting. Roberta did not care for the slippers. — Beverly Cleary

If the seasons bleed into each other like a watercolor painting, it means not enough fish and berries to last the winter, not enough wood chopped for the stove, not enough meat in the freezer. One year winter came so fast and so hard, the leaves on the birch trees didn't even have time to turn yellow and fall off; they froze solid green on the branches. They clung there for months on skinny skeleton arms, the color so blindingly wrong it was creepy. Every year it's a race between the seasons, and that year fall lost. — Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

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

It was the first time she'd said the words aloud and they caused hot tears to glaze her eyes. "I ... drew attention to myself." "A dangerous thing to do." "The money my husband left is gone. I am unemployed. And winter will soon be upon us. How am I to survive? To feed Sophie and keep her warm?" She turned to look at him. Their gazes came together. She wanted to look away but couldn't. He placed the wineglass in her hand, forced her fingers to coil around it. His touch felt hot against her cold hands, made her shiver. She remembered his office suddenly - and all that food stacked within it. "It is just wine," he said again, and the scent of it, of black cherries and dark rich earth and a hint of lavender, wafted up to her nose, reminding her of the life she'd had — Kristin Hannah

The same old rain, and, if not welcomed, at least accepted - an old gray aunt who came to visit every winter and stayed till spring. You learn to live with her. You learn to reconcile yourself to the little inconveniences and not get annoyed. You remember she is seldom angry or vicious and nothing to get in a stew about, and if she is a bore and stays overlong you can train yourself not to notice her, or at least not to stew about her. Which — Ken Kesey

Redemption, he thought. Spring came no matter how dark and cruel the winter might be. Jakub — Linda Lafferty

He was never rash or hurried, but he was always read. It was the secret, no doubt, of the extraordinary political career he threw away for my sake; it was also the explanation of his belief in me and devotion to my mission. When I came, he was ready. Nobody else on Winter was. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Brandybucks were blowing the Horn-call of Buckland, that had not been sounded for a hundred years, not since the white wolves came in the Fell Winter, when the Brandywine was frozen over. — J.R.R. Tolkien

For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come "again" and began to learn to expect. — A.S. Byatt

A winter ago I had an after-school seminar for high-school students and in one of the early sessions Una, a brilliant fifteen-year-old, a born writer who came to Harlem from Panama five years ago, and only then discovered the conflict between races, asked me, "Mrs. Franklin, do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?"
"Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts."
But I base my life on this belief. — Madeleine L'Engle

Kaka beat Fletcher to the ball, and headed it past Heinze as the Argentine sought to close him down. Heinze could still have dealt with the problem, but, inexplicably, Patrice Evra came flying in like a runaway TGV. Heinze was flattened, Fletcher was so shocked that he stopped to rubber-neck, and Kaka strolled on and rolled the ball past Van der Sar. Evra's nightmare of a half continued when he crazily got himself cautioned for dissent, so removing Ferguson's one remaining first-choice defender from the away leg. Madness. — Henry Winter

It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her. — Oscar Wilde

During our last year in the mountains new people came deep into our lives and nothing was ever the same again. The winter of the avalanches was like a happy and innocent winter in childhood compared to the next winter, a nightmare winter disguised as the greatest fun of all, and the murderous summer that was to follow. It was that year that the rich showed up. — Ernest Hemingway,

This is where the pivotal events of my childhood unfolded, while I ate banana and root beer Popsicles, two by two, tucking the sticks neatly under the skirt of the chair. It's where Sunnybank Lad met Lady, Ken met his friend Flicka, Atlanta burned, Manderley burned, Lassie came home, Jim ran away, Alice got small, Wilbur got big, David Copperfield was born, Beth died, and, on an endless gloomy winter afternoon, Jody shot his yearling. — Jo Ann Beard

It be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but "show your faith by your works," that God may bless you. — Thomas Paine

In the summers we swam in the river and caught minnows with jam pots; on Sunday evenings my father fished in it, bringing home each time a bag of trout. In winter salmon came up to this quiet backwater to spawn and, of course, there was a certain amount of poaching, to which my father objected strongly. Once, when a generous neighbour gave us a present of a poached salmon, he lined us all up around the kitchen table and proceeded to open up the fish. As the eggs poured out he explained about the huge loss of fish life due to the poaching of this one salmon. In my father's world nature possessed a balance and man had no right to upset that balance to satisfy his own greed; killing this fish was going against the laws of nature. — Alice Taylor

It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing. A person who had not given up believing that she sang, that music would come to her because she wanted it to come, and it had to come, and she would use everything in her power to encourage it to do so. — Kathleen Winter

The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire. — Charles Dickens

There's something about the Pacific Northwest, the scale of it, and the fact that not so long ago people came here and died getting here, and then died the first winter they were here. There's this breathtaking beauty, just a little bit of moss on the tree, just this little thread of danger, and the sinister. And I really like that. — Chelsea Cain

And she told me the same thing, she said that when I came back in the winter, she was going to miss missing me ... — Ursula K. Le Guin

It was snowing when I got off the bus at Flax Hill. Not quite regular snowfall, not exactly a blizzard. This is how it was: The snow came down heavily, settled for about a minute, then the wind moved it - more rolled it, really - onto another target. One minute you were covered in snow, then it sped off sideways, as if a brisk, invisible giant had taken pity and brushed you down. — Helen Oyeyemi

There was a gay man who lived nearby when I was growing up,' Harry recounted.
'He must have been forty or so, lived alone, and everyone in the neighbourhood knew he was gay. In the winter we threw snowballs at him, shouted "buttfucker" then ran like mad, convinced he would give us one up the backside if he caught us. But he never came after us, just pulled his hat further down over his ears and walked home. One day, suddenly, he moved. He never did anything to me, and I've always wondered why I hated him so much.'
'People are afraid of what they don't understand. And hate what they're afraid of. — Jo Nesbo

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

The entire gamut of the view's changes should have been known to her; its winter aspect, spring, summer and autumn; how storms came up from the sea; how the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds went over. — Virginia Woolf

All this blackness was within him, but that was where it really mattered. It was night without moon or stars, it was a doorless pit in the earth's bowels, it was forever. He felt black ice growing, blooming in his veins. One last sharp feeling was left to him
the bitter taste of failure. Then that went too. All was nothing.
Cold and everlasting night, and an everlasting laughter that was older and colder than the stars he would never see again. His heart squirmed wildly in his chest, seeking an escape that was denied it. Laughter like a glacier came again, rolling and crushing all else before it.
A bird sang. — Susan Dexter

I wanted a life of my own, a life where I could feel myself being a part of Winter. And that, to me, came though fighting for it. — Sara Raasch

They gathered after mass, sang hymns and read. Everyone had grown even more serene; beneath the sisters' kerchiefs it was as if there were no faces. When they met Daryushka - it was as if they bowed down lower. She was walking in the Spirit.

Daryushka was entirely serene. She was thinking of nothing, had turned within herself, peering inside; and inside her all was smiling ever so gently.

After the storm clear days came, frosty, crackling, clear days. Snow and sky, snow and sky, and the sky was even brighter, whiter, from the snow - and the snow sparkled with blue fires from the sky.

Daryushka went down to the river with buckets, to the ice-hole. She went down to the landing alone... Snow, and sky, and brilliance...

("He Has Descended") — Zinaida Gippius

The dirigible came to rest as lightly as a butterfly on an egg, if the butterfly were to stumble a bit and list heavily to one side and the egg to take on the peculiar characteristics of Scotland in winter: more soggy and more gray than one would think possible. — Gail Carriger

This is the sort of thing we should say by the fireside in the winter-time, as we lie on soft couches after a good meal, drinking sweet wine and crunching chickpeas: Of what country are you, and how old are you, good sir? And how old were you when the Mede came? — Herodotus

Winter came early that year. Snow filled the gray December air like fragments of torn-up hope — Philip Kerr

Both formality and dinner forgotten we sat on the floor of the little library, choosing. Sometimes Dr Portman read passages aloud and turned his own memories with their dark side to face the light. And it was late afternoon when, with a headache of happiness, I returned to the ward. And from that day I felt in myself a reserve of warmth from which I could help myself, like coal from the cellar on a winter's day, if the snow came or if the frost fell in the night to blacken the flowers and wither the new fruit. — Janet Frame

One story that circulated about (U.S. Minister to Russia Charles S.) Todd concerned his conversation with a lady-in-waiting at an Imperial reception in the Winter Palace. In his bad French with a Kentucky accent, he mispronounced the word for year, so that an explanation of his travels came out: "I was an ass in Paris, part of an ass in London, almost an ass in Germany, and I am two asses here." To which the lady reportedly responded, "And you will be an ass wherever you go. — Norman E. Saul

Just when they thought I was done for the winter, I came out stuntin I'm such a big spender. — Nicki Minaj

Winter always carries with it something of our sadness; then April came, that daybreak of summer, fresh like every dawn, gay like every childhood; weeping a little sometimes like the infant that it is. Nature in this month has charming gleams which pass from the sky, the clouds, the trees, the fields, and the flowers, into the heart of man. — Victor Hugo

Winter Comes

Winter came too quick for me
it seems as though it was just spring.
Now summers gone and fall is here,
As the year behind just disappears. — Reed Abbitt Moore

Then there was Jeannot, who was reminded of another war and who was discovering inside himself the roots of a mad hopefulness that made him want to believe that the present hour might appease the torture of memories, and he could again see the paths of his life opening up before him, paths that came to an abrupt end the day he saw his brother die. Every morning he got up to face this wound that no one could see, and he drank his wine and laughed at stories, and his soul was more bare than a rosebush in winter. — Muriel Barbery

I remembered the taste of good Italian coffee in my London flat, brewed at the expense of time and a good deal of mess, compared to the sort that came out of machines in the office at the press of a button. I remembered walking to art school, through the windy winter, over hills and heaths: how much gladder I was to reach the rich warmth and to toast my hands on a radiator, than if I had gone by car. I remembered the nickels my father gave me as a child for being good: how much more I valued them than I would a dollar bill given all at once for no reason. Of course God as the ultimate parent could give happiness for the asking, just as my father could have given a handful of dollar bills, but at the age of five would I have known its value, or would it have looked to me just like a wad of grubby green paper? — Sumangali Morhall

Living on the Plains"

That winter when this thought came-how the river
held still every midnight and flowed
backward a minute-we studied algebra
late in our room fixed up in the barn,
and I would feel the curved relation,
the rafters upside down, and the cows in their life
holding the earth round and ready
to meet itself again when morning came.

At breakfast while my mother stirred the cereal
she said, "You're studying too hard,"
and I would include her face and hands in my glance
and then look past my father's gaze as
he told again our great race through the stars
and how the world can't keep up with our dreams. — William Stafford

I came into Chicago in winter - I'd never been so cold in my life! I was very homesick, and a poor student at that time. America seemed so different and so filled with amazing things - and almost all of them were out of my reach. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor's boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on. — Douglas Adams

Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures.11 Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos - whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes - premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being. — Karen Armstrong

It was only sometimes, when a spring day came in the middle of winter, that one had a sudden feeling that nothing was really impossible — Barbara Pym

There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Luthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Luthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where he feet had passed. Then the spell of silence fell from Beren, and he called to her, crying Tinuviel; and the woods echoed the name. — J.R.R. Tolkien

The summer lasted a long long time, like verse after verse of a ballad, but when it ended, it ended like a man falling dead in the street of heart trouble. One night, all in one night, severe winter came, a white horse of snow rolling over Bountiful, snorting and rolling in its meadows, its fields. — Ardyth Kennelly

I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America. The mother and father osprey stay together. It's a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children. They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter - the mother and father ... — Alan Lightman

Mostly, kids were expected to entertain themselves and stay out of their parents' hair. To that end, you were sent outside to play at the drop of a hat. It wasn't an option; it was a standing mandate. If there wasn't a winter blizzard or a spring rainstorm or a summer heat wave, you went outside and stayed outside until the next mealtime came around. — Terry Brooks

He would stand by her. He would stand by her as long as the sun came up in the morning, as long as spring followed winter. — Karen Kingsbury

I envy the delusion to which you are a victim. You go forth with joy to gather flowers for your princess, - in winter, - and grieve when you can find none, and cannot understand why they do not grow. But I wander forth without joy, without hope, without design; and I return as I came. You fancy what a man you would be if the states general paid you. Happy mortal, who can ascribe your wretchedness to an earthly cause! You do not know, you do not feel, that in your own distracted heart
and disordered brain dwells the source of that unhappiness which all the potentates on earth cannot relieve. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I will fly away to them, to the royal birds, and they will beat me, because I, that am so ugly, dare to come near them. But it is all the same. Better to be killed by them than to be pursued by ducks, and beaten by fowls, and pushed about by the girl who takes care of the poultry yard, and to suffer hunger in winter!" And it flew out into the water, and swam towards the beautiful swans; these looked at it, and came sailing down upon it with outspread wings. "Kill me!" said the poor creature, and bent its head down upon the water, expecting nothing but death. But what was this that it saw in the clear water? It beheld its own image; and, lo! it was no longer a clumsy dark-gray bird, ugly and hateful to look at, but a - swan! — Hamilton Wright Mabie

Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped.
[ ... ] He closed his eyes, and opened them again. He was still weeping, but he was back in Luxembourg again. He was marching with a lot of other prisoners. It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes. — Kurt Vonnegut