14 Famous Authors Best Quotes About Fall

Pumpkin spiced latte season has come ‘round again, and I for one could not be more thrilled — and not just for the cinnamon-flavored caffeine jolt. From the start of fresh school years and the falling leaves, to crisp sweater weather and apple picking, to cozy fireplaces and cheerful pumpkin farms, fall has always, always, ALWAYS been my favorite season. To be honest, this time of year is almost too lovely to put into words — so I’ll just let these famous writers’ best quotes about fall say it all for me. And you don’t have to be Robert Frost to wax poetic about autumn leaves either — tons of writers have perfectly captured the crisp, orangey-glowey essence of the fall season, from Ray Bradbury, to L.M. Montgomery, to yes: Walt Whitman.

The only thing better than drinking a pumpkin spiced latte on a cool fall day is reading a good book while drinking a pumpkin spiced latte on a cool fall day — especially if that book celebrates everything there is to love about falling leaves and chilly breezes. Get ready to grab your favorite sweater and cozy up by the fireplace, because here are 14 famous authors’ best quotes about fall (they’ll make you fall in love with the season, even if you’ve always been an iced summertime latte kind of gal — I promise.)

1. “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 honey-sweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

2. “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

3. “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

― Albert Camus

4. “...and so many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole world smelled like pie.”

― Alice Hoffman

5. “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

6. “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."

― John Donne

7. “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

8. “Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.”

― J.K. Rowling

9. “There was a filmy veil of soft dull mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects, giving them a lilac hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was singing ... The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them all low to the ground. Already one or two kept constantly floating down, amber and golden in the low slanting sun-rays.”

― Elizabeth Gaskell

10. “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 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

11. “Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard.Give me the splendid silent sun.”

― Walt Whitman

12. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

― Henry David Thoreau

13. “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!”

― Rainbow Rowell

14. “I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”

― L.M. Montgomery

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