"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." — Ernest Dowson --

"There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves." — Joe L. Wheeler --

"Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves / We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!" — Humbert Wolfe --

"No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face." — John Donne, The Autumnal --

"At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost." — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne --

"Why did dusk and fir-scent and the afterglow of autumnal sunsets make people say absurd things?" — L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest --

"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves..." — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse --

 "Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits." -- Samuel Butler --

 "You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason." -- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast --

 "I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it." -- Lee Maynard --

 "The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxurian autumn asleep till morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens and the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars." -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky --

 "Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter." -- Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way -- 

 "I am so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers." -- L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables --

 "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower." -- Albert Camus --

 "That old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air . . . Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer." -- Wallace Stegner --