13 Summer Solstice Quotes To Celebrate The Longest Day Of The Year

June 21 marks the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the longest day of the year, and the first official day of summer. There are plenty of ways to celebrate the occasion, from sunrise yoga and sunset dance parties to rooftop hangs and backyard barbecues. Oh, and don’t forget the obligatory IG post to commemorate the start of the season. No matter how you decide to ring in the new season, these summer solstice quotes are here to get you in the spirit.

Let’s be real: summer is the best season because it's the one filled with hot sun, warm breezes, and plenty of daylight hours. It's the time of year meant for cookouts and campfires, jet-setting and weekend getaways, and lazy days by the beach. It's the season of fun and laughter, and according to the Farmer’s Almanac, it all begins on June 21 at 10:58 a.m. ET when the summer solstice officially occurs. To help you kick off the first day of the summer and embrace all the magic the coming months have to hold, here are 13 summer solstice quotes that will get you excited for the best season of all. Not that you need any help with that, though.

1. "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

2. "Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing."

― Truman Capote, Summer Crossing

3. "Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill."

― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

4. "The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings."

― George Eliot, Middlemarch

5. "Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, and left the flushed print in a poppy there."

― Francis Thompson

6. "Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August."

— Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

7. "And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

8. "It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside."

― Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy-Tacy and Tib

9. "Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly."

— Pablo Neruda

10. "The days draw out, the weather gets warmer, and it's what we call summer, with a bitter laugh when we've said it."

— Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving

11. "Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp — everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs."

― E.B. White

12. "Summertime is always the best of what might be."

— Charles Bowden

13. "The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon."

― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea