Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: My Favourite Summer Quotes From Books

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A straw hat with a black ribbon wrapped around it is sitting on top of some wheat in a field. The wheat is golden brown and looks ready to harvest. I have no idea why the hat was left there. I’ve done a lot of quote posts for various blog hops over the years, so I’m going to make it a little more challenging for myself this week by narrowing it down to quotes about summer.

1. “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
Henry James

 

2. “Ô, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.”
Roman Payne

 

3. “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

 

4. “All in all, it was a never-to-be-forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world.”
L.M. Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams

 

5. “The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.”
E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

 

6. “some winters
will never melt

some summers
will never freeze

and some things will only
… live in poems.”
Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence

 

7. “I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.”
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

 

8. “The sidewalks were haunted by dust
ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up,
swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice on
the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strol-
lers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a
volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes every-
where, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritable
dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spon-
taneous combustion at three in the morning.

Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element for
element. Air ran like hot spring waters nowhere, with no
sound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep
over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serene
vapors. Tar was poured licorice in the streets, red bricks were
brass and gold, roof tops were paved with bronze. The high-
tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threat
above the unslept houses.
The cicadas sang louder and yet louder.
The sun did not rise, it overflowed.”
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

8 Comments

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8 Responses to Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: My Favourite Summer Quotes From Books

  1. Some of these quotes are really beautiful. I love the one from Charlotte’s Web. It’s such a lovely book. Also, the one about sunlight by Roman Payne rings so true.

  2. I love these quotes….. and I love Dandelion Wine! It’s been years since I’ve read it. I believe it’s time this summer for a do-over.

  3. I love that Tuck Everlasting quote! Great choice of quotes!

  4. Your cricket quote makes me wonder — do you get cicadas in your area of Canada? We have them every year (in addition to the periodic broods), and hearing them is almost more of “It is now summer” marker than even the Solstice.

    Cicada droning:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooiSfD2a6pI

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