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Autumn is a season that many love more than any other

• Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter. Carol Bishop Hipps
• Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. George Eliot
• I cherish the loneliness of autumn…. I am forty, I have become mortal. I have no further psychic, emotional, or intellectual need to prolong summer seasons, and it is only when autumn begins its play that I can truly focus on the rich and vital life I am living. All of a sudden, I grow alert. October is a hallelujah! reverberating in my body year- round…. The air is dusty, it smells of dry pine needles; yet I sense imminent ice in the clear blue sky…. How I appreciate everything… fully! After all, tomorrow this reprieve will be buried by blizzards, crushed under slabs of doomsday ice. I cannot waste a minute indoors! I must take advantage of this gift, wedged so tentatively between summer’s hectic somnolence and winter’s harsh apogee…. Each perfect day, I know, is going to be the last beautiful day of autumn. John Nichols
• It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. D. James
• Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a pefect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. George Eliot
• There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky. Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him. Hal Borland
• Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and colour and a time of completion; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with Autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the substance of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon? Hal Borland
• I cannot write of things which even impassioned breath cannot utter. Autumn is coming with its days of gold, its days of reverie and of you—oh, such delightful hours that my heart burns within me at the anticipation. Byron Caldwell Smith, letter to Kate Stephens
• I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
• ..the year’s last, loveliest smile. William Cullen Bryant
• I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
• Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. George Eliot
• Summer,  Winter,  Spring,  Life is a natural cycle,  Getting older,  Death

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There is no season more beautiful than autumn …

• Autumn bowed to place a beautiful crown on the Queen of Morning, and her velvet robes sway merrily in the chilly breeze. Terri Guillemets
• For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October. Hal Borland
• No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face. John Donne
• I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it. Lee Maynard
• There is no season in all the year so beautiful, so radiant with glory, as the early autumn. There is no time when the human soul drinks in so fully the glory and beauty of nature. All objects of beauty are more beautiful while passing away from us. The closing up of a beautiful life—the fading of the holy stars in the dim light of morning—the ending of a quiet summer day and the passing away of the bright summer glory, are all more sweet and lovely as they are lost to us. The death-glow always beautifies anything that wears the trace of beauty ere it goes back to nothingness. We do not understand the secret of this principle, yet we know that it is some law of the infinite mind. Northern Advocate
• The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many…. September is dressing herself in showy dahlias and splendid marigolds and starry zinnias. October, the extravagant sister, has ordered an immense amount of the most gorgeous forest tapestry for her grand reception. Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Beauty

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… a time of falling leaves …

• Around and around the house the leaves fall thick—but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow. Let the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
• There he goes, in his long russet surtout, sweeping down yonder gravel-walk, beneath the trees, like a yellow leaf in autumn wafted along by a fitful gust of wind. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, of Monsieur d’Argentville
• Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. Albert Camus
• If you stand still outside you can hear it… Winter’s footsteps, the sound of falling leaves. Toshihiro Kawabata
• Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year. Chad Sugg
• Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground. Andrea Gibson
• There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves. Joe L. Wheeler

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… when nature’s fire purges the landscape of green …

• A hidden fire burns perpetually upon the hearth of the world…. In autumn, this great conflagration becomes especially manifest. Then the flame that is slowly and mysteriously consuming every green thing bursts into vivid radiance. Every blade of grass and every leaf in the woodlands is cast into the great oven of Nature; and the bright colours of their fading are literally the flames of their consuming. The golden harvest-fields are glowing in the heart of the furnace…. By this autumn fire God every year purges the floor of nature. All effete substances that have served their purpose in the old form are burnt up. Everywhere God makes sweet and clean the earth with fire. Hugh Macmillan
• October’s poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter. Nova S. Bair
• Now Autumn’s fire burns slowly along the woods and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt. William Allingham

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… to create a wonder world of colours …

• In Autumn, you can take one maple leaf and see almost all the colours of the rainbow in it – although you would need your imagination to see blue. Dorthe Eisenhardt
• A tangerine and russet cascade of kaleidoscopic leaves, creates a tapestry of autumn magic upon the emerald carpet of fading summer. Judith A. Lindberg
• 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 colour 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 and silence of winter. Fall is begging for us to dance and sing and write with just the same drama and blaze. Shauna Niequist
• I step outside and the chilly air tightens the skin on my bare arms. Summer has ended all too quickly, and some of the leaves on the trees have already started to burn with the colours of fall. Fall colours…. so bright and intense and beautiful. It’s like nature is trying to fill you up with colour, to saturate you so you can stockpile it before winter turns everything muted and dreary. Siobhan Vivian, Same Difference
• It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. The rich colours of grass and earth were intensified by the mellow light of a sun almost warm enough for spring… P.D. James, A Taste for Death
• It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet…. As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye… ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
• After the first autumn rains, how inimitable the beauty of days—the fall colours, not yet faded, washed out, in the winter deluge, but dripping, glistening, every crystal drop refracting the hue it trickles over. Running, draining colour, brighter before the soil takes back again the positive red and yellow and blue to weave into the misty textures of spring. Virginia Garland
• The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce. D. H. Lawrence
• Orange is one of God’s favourite colours— He stuck it right there between red and yellow as the second colour in the rainbow. He decorates entire forests with shades of orange every autumn. It shows up in sunrises at the start of the day, sunsets at the end of the day, and in the glow of the moon at the right time of night. Reggie Joiner
• Fall colours are funny. They’re so bright and intense and beautiful. It’s like nature is trying to fill you up with colour, to saturate you so you can stockpile it before winter turns everything muted and dreary. Siobhan Vivian
• Colour

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… especially gold and crimson …

• In autumn, don’t go to jewellers to see gold; go to the parks! Mehmet Murat Ildan
• It is the sense of unfamiliar envelopment that is impressive, whether in the living grays of hoarfrost, the crimson of the heavens at sunset, or the golden suffusions of autumn. Walter J. Phillips
• Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons. Jim Bishop
• Catch a vista of maples in that long light and you see Autumn glowing through the leaves…. The promise of gold and crimson is there among the branches, though as yet it is achieved on only a stray branch, an impatient limb or an occasional small tree which has not yet learned to time its changes. Hal Borland
• It was October again… a glorious October, all red and gold, with mellow mornings when the valleys were filled with delicate mists as if the spirit of autumn had poured them in for the sun to drain — amethyst, pearl, silver, rose, and smoke-blue. The dews were so heavy that the fields glistened like cloth of silver and there were such heaps of rustling leaves in the hollows of many-stemmed woods to run crisply through. L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
• October was a beautiful month at Green Gables, when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson and the wild cherry trees along the lane put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green, while the fields sunned themselves in the aftermaths. Anne reveled in the world of colour about her…. “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?…” Lucy Maud Montgomery
• The time of the falling leaves has come again. Once more in our morning walk we tread upon carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and bronze, woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate textures while we slept. How beautifully the leaves grow old! How full of light and colour are their last days! There are exceptions, of course. The leaves of most of the fruit-trees fade and wither and fall ingloriously. They bequeath their heritage of colour to their fruit. Upon it they lavish the hues which other trees lavish upon their leaves…. But in October what a feast to the eye our woods and groves present! The whole body of the air seems enriched by their calm, slow radiance. They are giving back the light they have been absorbing from the sun all summer.  John Burroughs

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… in the beautiful light

• I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints. Henry David Thoreau
• Methinks I see the sunset light flooding the river valley, the western hills stretching to the horizon, overhung with trees gorgeous and glowing with the tints of autumn—a mighty flower garden, blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, Frost… John Greenleaf Whittier
• Light

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Autumn is the ultimate artistic masterpiece of nature

• As artist Nature splashes colour across the vast canvas of the sky with the radiance and splendour of sunrise and sunset. She arches rainbows against the passing storm, creates flowers and foliage, sets autumn woods on fire with the beauty of turning leaves and touches mountaintops with snow crystals. Wilferd A. Peterson
• Fiery colours begin their yearly conquest of the hills, propelled by the autumn winds. Fall is the artist. Takayuki Ikkaku
• Winter is an etching, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic. Stanley Horowitz
• Fall has always been my favourite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale. Lauren DeStefano, Wither
• Each leaf plays a note in the symphony of autumn. Pepper Blair
• Nature

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Who can look upon Autumn and not think of its Creator?

• It’s simple things, like a glowing sunset, the sound of a running stream or the fresh smell in a meadow that cause us to pause and marvel at the wonder of life, to contemplate its meaning and significance. Who can hold an autumn leaf in their hand, or sift the warm white sand on the beach, and not wonder at the Creator of it all? Wendy Moore
• The human soul is slow to discover the real excellence of things given to us by a bountiful Creator, and not until the shadows of death begin to gather around the object that we love, do we see its worth and beauty. Autumn is the dim shadow that clusters about the sweet, precious things that God has created in the realm of nature. While it robs them of life, it tears away the veil and reveals the golden gem of beauty and sweetness. Beauty lurks in all the dim old aisles of nature, and we discover it at last. Northern Advocate
• One does not need to fast for days and meditate for hours at a time to experience the sense of sublime mystery which constantly envelops us. All one need do is to notice intelligently, if even for a brief moment, a blossoming tree, a forest flooded with autumn colours, an infant smiling.  Simon Greenberg

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Autumn heralds the end of summer …

• That old September feeling… 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 and failures had been wiped clean by summer. Wallace Stegner
• Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end. Remy de Gourmont
• But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favourite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you. Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot
• If spring betrays the summer, would autumn never arrive? Terri Guillemets
• The music of the far-away summer flutters around the Autumn seeking its former nest. Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
• Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life. Hal Borland
• Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying goodbye. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
• Summer

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… and the coming of winter

• Autumn is the hush before winter. French Proverb
• But you can’t plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Winter dies into the spring, to be born again in the autumn. Terri Guillemets
• The hush comes with the deepening of Autumn; but it comes gradually. Our ears are attuned to it, day by quieter day. But even now, if one awakens in the deep darkness of the small hours, one can hear it, a foretaste of Winter silence. It’s a little painful now, and a little lonely because it is so strange. Hal Borland
• October’s poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter. Nova S. Bair
• Winter

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Autumn is a time of migrating birds

• Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a pefect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. George Eliot
• When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash – at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. Thomas Merton
• Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable…the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street…by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese. Hal Borland
• Birds

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There is nothing more sublime than an autumn morning

• There ought to be a way to combine “autumn” and “morning” into one word, the combination of the two is special enough to be its own entity. Terri Guillemets
• Autumn bowed to place a beautiful crown on the Queen of Morning, and her velvet robes sway merrily in the chilly breeze. Terri Guillemets
• It is about five o’clock in an evening that the first hour of spring strikes — autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day. Elizabeth Bowen
• Autumn mornings: sunshine and crisp air, birds and calmness, year’s end and day’s beginnings. Terri Guillemets

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Autumn touches the soul

• Fall hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die—migrate or die. Stephen King
• The soul

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Autumn is the inspiration of poets

• Autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such like musings and quotations… Jane Austen

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Autumn has a certain sadness to it

• Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize. George Eliot
• Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad? Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
• Then summer fades and passes, and October comes. Will smell smoke then, and feel an unsuspected sharpness, a thrill of nervous, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure. Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
• The days may not be so bright and balmy—yet the quiet and melancholy that linger around them is fraught with glory. Over everything connected with autumn there lingers some golden spell—some unseen influence that penetrates the soul with its mysterious power. Northern Advocate
• Thanksgiving is the winding up of autumn. The leaves are off the trees, except here and there on a beech or an oak; there is nothing left on the boughs but a few nuts and empty birds’ nests. The earth looks desolate, and it will be a comfort to have the snow on the ground, and to hear the merry jingle of the sleigh-bells. Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods. Every step that Time takes imprints upon the fields as they grow bare and brown… Charles Nodier
• Give me a land of boughs in leaf / A land of trees that stand; / Where trees are fallen there is grief; / I love no leafless land.  E. Housman
• Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves, O flakes of snow, For which, through naked trees, the winds A-mourning go? John B. Tabb
• My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane. Robert Frost
• A strangely reflective, even melancholy day. Is that because, unlike our cousins in the northern hemisphere, Easter is not associated with the energy and vitality of spring but with the more subdued spirit of autumn? Hugh Mackay
• Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay. Robert Browning
• Sadness,  Grief

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Autumn is a time of crisp air

• Autumn mornings: sunshine and crisp air, birds and calmness, year’s end and day’s beginnings. Terri Guillemets
• Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first of September was crisp and golden as an apple… J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
• The day after the day that I walk out the front door and the air is crisp, with just a hint of the Autumn days ahead, I put cinnamon in my coffee. Betsy Cañas Garmon
• The sun declined, and we both fell into twilight silence. Night, which in autumn seems to fall from the sky at once, it comes so quickly, chilled us, and we rolled ourselves in our cloaks… Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
• I was drinking in the surroundings: air so crisp you could snap it with your fingers and greens in every lush shade imaginable offset by autumnal flashes of red and yellow. Wendy Delsol
• Autumn that year painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under harvest skies. Sharon Kay Penman

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Autumn is a time of rich smells

• 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 Cezanne
• The senses

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Autumn is a time of ripening fruit …

• God, we thank you for this earth, our homes; for the wide sky and the blessed sun, for the salt sea and the running water, for the everlasting hills and the never resting winds, for trees and the common grass underfoot. We thank you for our senses by which we hear the songs of birds, and see the splendour of the summer fields, and taste of the autumn fruits, and rejoice in the feel of the snow, and smell the breath of the spring. Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty; and save our souls from being so blind that we pass unseeing when even the common thorn bush is aflame with your glory.  Walter Rauschenbusch
• Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. Samuel Butler
• She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened. Sarah Addison Allen
• Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn. Walter Scott
• Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard. Give me the splendid silent sun.  Walt Whitman
• No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring. Samuel Johnson

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… and rich harvests

• For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad. Edwin Way Teale
• It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn. C. Forbes
• I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time. Robert Browning

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Autumn is a time to take stock

• Autumn is the perfect time to take account of what we’ve done, what we didn’t do, and what we’d like to do next year.

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Autumn is a time for new beginnings

• Somewhere along the way, I realized that the new year doesn’t begin for me in January. The new and fresh has always come for me in the Fall. Ironically, as leaves are falling like rain, crunching beneath my feet with finality, I am vibrating with the excitement of birth and new beginnings…. My year begins in Autumn. Betsy Cañas Garmon
• Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring. Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• The spring, summer, is quite a hectic time for people in their lives, but then it comes to autumn, and to winter, and you can’t but help think back to the year that was, and then hopefully looking forward to the year that is approaching. Enya

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Autumn is a time to get out of the house and into the woods

• …I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the daylight hours in the open air. Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn. I started going for long lone country walks among the spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end, giving myself up to the earth-scents and the sky-winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul. Monica Baldwin, I Leap Over the Wall: Contrasts and Impressions After Twenty-Eight Years in a Convent
• I must take advantage of this gift, wedged so tentatively between summer’s hectic somnolence and winter’s harsh apogee…. Each perfect day, I know, is going to be the last beautiful day of autumn. John Nichols
• Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn. John Muir
• Forests

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Autumn is a time of transient clouds

• The smile that flickers on baby’s lips when he sleeps — does anyone know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumour that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning. Rabindranath Tagore
• This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky.  Buddha
• Clouds

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Autumn is a time for pumpkin pie

• O’ pumpkin pie, your time has come ’round again and I am autumnrifically happy! Terri Guillemets
• Oh, how we love pumpkin season. You did know this gourd-ish squash has its own season, right? Winter, Spring, Summer, Pumpkin…. We anxiously anticipate it every year. Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer
• I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. Henry David Thoreau

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Autumn is a popular metaphor for old age and death

• A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. And gift. By focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation.  Life is neither linear nor stagnant.  It is movement from mystery to mystery.  Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. Rachel Naomi Remen
• Beautiful is old age—beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man, Nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children’s children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful. A. Froude
• This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky. Buddha
• You can’t hide your true colours as you approach the autumn of your life.
• We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Time remorselessly rumbles down the corridors and streets of our lives. But it is not until autumn that most of us become aware that our tickets are stamped with a terminal destination… that whatever can be done with our thoughts, words, and actions must be done soon. As we hypnotically watch the steadily diminishing reserve of sand in Life’s hourglass, the instincts of a miser surface. Life is now savoured, sipped as with a fine nineteenth-century French wine…. It is during the autumn of our lives that this inner vintage begins to sculpt and paint the face as it seeps through the skin from within. Joe L. Wheeler
• On the whole, I take it that middle age is a happier period than youth. In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October, when the trees are bare to the mild heavens, and the red leaves bestrew the road, and you can feel the breath of winter morning and evening—no days so calm, so tenderly solemn, and with such a reverent meekness in the air. Alexander Smith
• Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. Samuel Butler
• Metaphors to live by,  Getting older gracefully

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Here are some more autumn metaphors

• A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives, all bear secret relation to our destinies. It gave me indescribable pleasure to see the return of the tempestuous season… François-René de Chateaubriand
• We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Thoughts on autumn and gardening

• Fall, not spring, is the time in this region to clear away dead leaves and branches, to renovate the borders, to start new gardens…. And even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn. Elizabeth Lawrence, A Southern Garden
• A garden that never died eventually would weary. Robbed of springtime, unacquainted with the extraordinary perfume that rises from the soil after it’s had its rest, the garden that winter doesn’t visit is a dull place.  The return every spring of earth’s first freshness would never be kept if not for the frosts and rot and ripe deaths of fall.  So when I go out from the garden for the last time in autumn, I leave the gate open behind me.  Michael Pollan
• An autumn garden has a sadness when the sun is not shining… Francis Brett Young
• Gardening

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Thoughts on the interplay of spring and autumn

• It is about five o’clock in an evening that the first hour of spring strikes — autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day. Elizabeth Bowen
• Spring blossoms are fairy tales, autumn leaves are tragic dramas. Mehmet Murat ildan
• Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance.  Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.  Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.  Yoko Ono
• Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. Albert Camus
• Winter is an etching, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic. Stanley Horowitz
• Spring

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• Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year. Chad Sugg
• I want to say something so embarrassing about September that even the leaves start blushing and turning red. Jarod Kintz
• Bulb: A potential flower buried in autumn, never to be seen again. Henry Beard
• Autumn is the most beautiful time of the year to the person who has no leaves to rake.
• Fall is my favourite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change colour and fall from the trees. David Letterman

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