Here are the best fall quotes and inspirational autumn sayings to celebrate our favorite season.
Fall Quotes
- “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” — Albert Camus
- “Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.” — Yoko Ono
- “I sit beside the fire and think / Of all that I have seen / Of meadow flowers and butterflies / In summers that have been / Of yellow leaves and gossamer / In autumns that there were / With morning mist and silver sun / And wind upon my hair.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
- “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” — Henry David Thoreau
- “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” — L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
- “Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.” — Chad Sugg
- “It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.” — Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost
- “But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous a** 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 favorite 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
- “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
- “That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.” — Ray Bradbury, The October Country
- “The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant 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
- “A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.” — e.e. cummings
- “It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.” — Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
- “The smile that flickers on a baby’s lips when he sleeps- does anyone know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor 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
- “I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it.” — Lee Maynard
- “Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.” — J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
- “Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.” — Robert Browning
- “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
- “The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.” — Henry Beston
- “It’s the first day of autumn! A time of hot chocolatey mornings, and toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves!” — Winnie the Pooh, Pooh’s Grand Adventure
- “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- “Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?” — Mo Yan, Red Sorghum
- “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
- “Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.” — Samuel Butler
- “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
- “October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!” — Rainbow Rowell, Attachments
- “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
- “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.” — John Donne, The Autumnal
- “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
- “Why did dusk and fir-scent and the afterglow of autumnal sunsets make people say absurd things?” — L.M. Montgomery, Emily’s Quest
- “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
- “Fall colors are funny. They’re so bright and intense and beautiful. It’s like nature is trying to fill you up with color, to saturate you so you can stockpile it before winter turns everything muted and dreary.” — Siobhan Vivian, Same Difference
- “Spades take up leaves / No better than spoons, / And bags full of leaves / Are light as balloons. / I make a great noise / Of rustling all day / Like rabbit and deer / Running away.” — Robert Frost
- “Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go.”
- “Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.” — J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- “Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.” — Jim Bishop
- “Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” — Nora Ephron
- “You know how this is: / if I look / at the crystal moon, at the red branch / of the slow autumn at my window, / if I touch / near the fire / the impalpable ash / or the wrinkled body of the log, / everything carries me to you, / as if everything that exists, / aromas, light, metals, / were little boats / that sail / toward those isles of yours that wait for me.” — Pablo Neruda
- “Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.” — Leo Tolstoy
- “Autumn would come to this place of welcome, this place I would know to be home. Autumn would come and the air would grow cool, dry and magic, as it does that time of the year.” — Henry Rollins
- “Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonize.” — George Eliot
- “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?” — George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
- “Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of 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.” — Jane Austen, Persuasion
- “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, The Mountains of California
- “Go, sit upon the lofty hill, And turn your eyes around, Where waving woods and waters wild Do hymn an autumn sound. The summer sun is faint on them— The summer flowers depart— Sit still— as all transform’d to stone, Except your musing heart.” — Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Autumn
- “Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile.” — John Howard Bryant, Indian Summer
- “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, / Tears from the depths of some divine despair / Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, / In looking on the happy autumn fields, / And thinking of the days that are no more.” — Alfred Tennyson
- “The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.” — Jane Hirshfield, The Heat of Autumn
- “Fall has always been my favorite 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
- I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colors richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colors, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death." — Lin Yutang
- “Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.” — Rémy de Gourmont
- “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, Stork
- “After the keen still days of September, the October sun filled the world with mellow warmth … The maple tree in front of the doorstep burned like a gigantic red torch. The oaks along the roadway glowed yellow and bronze. The fields stretched like a carpet of jewels, emerald and topaz and garnet. Everywhere she walked the color shouted and sang around her … In October any wonderful unexpected thing might be possible.” — Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond
- “Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, they parted with leaves in their hair.” — Nicole Kraus, The History of Love
- “He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.” — J.R.R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
- “Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?” — Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
- “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
- “Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly. They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar.” — Delia Owens, Where the Crawdad Sings
- “My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it’s the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.” — Lauren Oliver, Delirium
- “The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward … The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
- “Life is deep and high and distant; and though only your vast vision can reach even her feet, yet she is near; and though only the breath of your breath reaches her heart, the shadow of your shadow crosses her face, and the echo of your faintest cry becomes a spring and an autumn in her breast.” — Khalil Gibran, The Garden of the Prophet
- “The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst. They can grope their way up the walls looking for a way in, but they won’t find one, everything is shut, and you sit inside, laughing in your warmth and your solitude, for you have had foresight.” — Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November
- “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
- “Never let me lose what I have gained, and adorn the branches of your river with leaves of my estranged Autumn.” — Federico García Lorca
- “Autumn lingered on as if fond of its own perfection.” — Winston Graham, Ross Poldark
- “If you run, then allow those first few breaths on a cool Autumn day to FREEZE your lungs and do not just be alarmed, be ALIVE.” — Kyle Lake
- “It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.” — P.D. James, A Taste for Death
- “Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.” — Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories
- “I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “And I rose / In rainy autumn / And walked abroad in a shower of all my days…” — Dylan Thomas
- “The tints of autumn…a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.” — John Greenleaf Whittier
- “Nostalgia - that’s the Autumn, / Dreaming through September / Just a million lovely things / I always will remember.” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
- “The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” — J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew
- “Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard.” — Walt Whitman Want more great quotes? 300 Instagram CaptionsLife Quotes 50 Thinking of You Quotes 150 Good Morning Quotes 100 Wedding and Marriage Quotes 50 Friday Quotes 100 Quotes about Change
