Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love. News from the humming city comes to it It sound of funeral or of marriage bells.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

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

Alfred Lord Tennyson

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer sea, But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

I am going a long way With these thou seëst-if indeed I go (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)- To the island-valley of Avilion, Where falls not hail or rain or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage, That never knew the summer woods: I envy not the beast that takes His license in the field of time, Unfetter’d by the sense of crime, To whom a conscience never wakes; Nor, what may count itself as blest, The heart that never plighted troth But stagnates in the weeds of sloth; Nor any want-begotten rest. I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Alexander Dubcek

Spring and summer 1942 was probably the worst period of internal terror in Slovakia. It was also the time of mass deportation of Slovak Jews to the extermination camps in Poland.

Aldo Leopold

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.

Ali Smith

Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly; they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.

Anne Stevenson

You sleep with a dream of summer weather, wake to the thrum of rain—roped down by rain. Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence. The mountains have had the sense to disappear. It's the Celtic temperament—wind, then torrents, then remorse. Glory rising like a curtain over distant water. Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark, docks in a pool of shadow all its own. That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck. Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.

Anna Letitia Barbauld

So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o'er; So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore.

Anne Robinson

Believe me, I've done my time travelling the world in cramped conditions and carrying my own luggage. Now my leisure is summers in the south of France or the Hamptons, walking in Connemara, and year-round shopping in Manhattan and Paris.

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

Anne Rice

A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.

Anne Rice

We live in a world full of accidents finally in which on aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever striving to create and maintain an ethical balance. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky – such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.

Anna Faris

I grew out my armpit hair for the summer. It turns out my natural hair colour isn't blonde.

Andrew Strauss

My caddy today was a Scot and he told me that he was cheering for Australia, which I thought was a bit harsh. But generally I've been amazed at how many people have come up to me here in Scotland and said: 'I've never really watched cricket before, but I was hooked all summer.' It's great.

Andrew Tobias

Summers are the best. And I figured summer was my best time for meeting someone, too, because in the summer people are looking for someone to snuggle up with for the winter. And because in the summer I could take off my shirt.

Andrew Sullivan

I was also reminded of one of the unique charms of NYC in the summer: vast piles of rotting garbage piled on the sidewalks, with that sweet yet nauseating smell of decomposing groceries sitting in the humid fetid air, and rancid food juices oozing over the sticky sidewalks. With my windows open to counter the stuffiness, I could occasionally catch a whiff of the stench outside. People actually like living in this chaotic, fetid monument to incompetence? Beats me.

Andrew Lang

O grant me a house by the beach of a bay, Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers! And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray, For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

Love can make a summer fly, or a night seem like a lifetime.

Andy Kindler

I don't know if it's the weather or what's going on - the summer or something like that - but recently I've been feeling extremely bisexual. I don't know what it is. I don't know what's going on, but I walked down the street and, suddenly, the ladies are looking awfully good to me.

Andrew Cuomo

My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.

Anthony Kiedis

All summer long; we'll be playing the festivals. We'll be Reading, we'll be Leeds, we'll be around.

Alice Waters

I have a love affair with tomatoes and corn. I remember them from my childhood. I only had them in the summer. They were extraordinary.

Alice Miller

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

Alice Hoffman

Always keep mint on your windowsill in August, to ensure that buzzing flies will stay outside, where they belong. Don't think the summer is over, even when roses droop and turn brown and the stars shift position in the sky. Never presume August is a safe or reliable time of the year.

Alice Cooper

School's-out-for-summer!!

Dinaw Mengestu

My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte Carlo her husband had been waiting in for nearly an hour, she could have said that she respected its place as a mediator between two extremes. Fall came and went, while winter was endured and summer was revered. Fall was the repose that made both possible and bearable, and now here she was was with her husband next to her, heading headlong into an early-fall afternoon with only the vaguest ideas of who they were becoming and what came next.

Derek Walcott

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,

Amber Heard

I was a lifeguard. It was my summer job growing up, and I never saved anyone. I never had to, thank goodness.

Anna Quindlen

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.