Books
It may be April, but for the last two weeks — in the Northeast, at least — it has felt like I've been trapped in Narnia's eternal winter. Luckily, warmer weather is on horizon, and I'm already picking out literary quotes about spring to caption my first outdoor #bookstagram of the season.
I have lived in the northeastern United States my whole life, which means that I'm well acquainted with all four seasons. As a longtime resident of Massachusetts, I know that humid summers tend feel like they'll never end, fall's beautiful foliage is gone too soon, winter's bitter temperatures threaten to last forever, but spring — well, the beauty of spring in New England makes it all worth it.
During the most glorious season of the year, the days finally get longer, the weather begins to warm up, and the brown dead earth starts to come back to life with every shade of the rainbow. In short, it's a beautiful time to be outside, especially if you're a reader. Beach reading has its many perks, but in this reader's opinion, nothing beats that first weekend in spring spent reading at an outdoor cafe, on the newly greened grass of the local park, or in your own backyard.
Whether you're trying to use your imagination to escape cold weather near you, or celebrate the first nice days of the season, here are 17 literary quotes about spring that totally capture what it's all about.
“What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
"On the new edge of springtime when I stand on the front porch shading my eyes from the weak morning light, sniffing out a tinge of green on the hill and the scent of yawning earthworms, oh, boy, then! I roll like a bear out of hibernation [...] Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I am nuts."
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
“If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
"Good first dates are more than short stories. They are first chapters. On a good first date, everything is springtime. And when a good first date becomes a relationship, the springtime lingers. Even after it's over, there can be springtime.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
“The morning air was like a new dress. That made her feel the apron tied around her waist. She untied it and flung it on a low bush beside the road and walked on, picking flowers and making a bouquet [...] From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
"I suppose the best kind of spring morning is the best weather God has to offer."
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
“She turned to the sunlight / And shook her yellow head, / And whispered to her neighbor: / 'Winter is dead.'"
― A.A. Milne, "When We Were Very Young"
“The sun just touched the morning; / The morning, happy thing, / Supposed that he had come to dwell, / And life would be all spring.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
"'Is the spring coming?' he said. 'What's it like?'... 'It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth.'"
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
"Spring grew on [...] and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps."
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg
“ [...] Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
"I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. / I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
― Pablo Neruda, "Every Day You Play..."
"A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city’s highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its façade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you."
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
"But the true nature of the human heart is a whimsical as spring weather. All signals may aim toward a fall of rain when suddenly the skies will clear."
― Maya Angelou, The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou
