"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
— Albert Camus

"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)

"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)

"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

"...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

"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

"Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring."
— Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's)

"no spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
as i have seen in one autumnal face."
— John Donne

"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

"Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,
We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!"
— Humbert Wolfe

"She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened."
— Sarah Addison Allen (Garden Spells)

"October proved a riot a riot to the senses and climaxed those giddy last weeks before Halloween."
— Keith Donohue

"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)

"There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops."
— Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)

"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."
— A.E. Housman

"--
Autumn -- Unlike fireworks which people also come to see,
God’s gift of foliage, lasts longer and is free. "
— ek

"The widower reviewed his past in a sunless light which was intensified by the greyness of the November twilight, whilst the bells subtly impregnated the surrounding atmosphere with the melody of sounds that faded like the ashes of dead years."
— Georges Rodenbach (Bruges-La-Morte)

" "You know," he said with unusual somberness, "I asked my father once why kenders were little, why we weren't big like humans and elves. I really wanted to be big," he said softly and for a moment he was quiet.
"What did your father say?" asked Fizban gently.
"He said kenders were small because we were meant to do small things. 'If you look at all the big things in the world closely,' he said, 'you'll see that they're really made up of small things all joined together.' That big dragon down there comes to nothing but tiny drops of blood, maybe. It's the small things that make the difference."
"Very wise, your father."
"Yes." Tas brushed his hand across his eyes. "I haven't seen him in a long time." The kender's pointed chin jutted forward, his lips tightened. His father, if he had seen him, would not have known this small, resolute person for his son.
"We'll leave the big things to others," Tas announced finally. "They've got Tanis and Sturm and Goldmoon. They'll manage. We'll do the small thing, even if it doesn't seem very important. We're going to rescue Sestun.""
— Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

"The magic of autumn has seized the countryside; now that the sun isn't ripening anything it shines for the sake of the golden age; for the sake of Eden; to please the moon for all I know."
— Elizabeth Coatsworth (Personal Geography: Almost and Autobiography)

"Leaves

How silently they tumble down
And come to rest upon the ground
To lay a carpet, rich and rare,
Beneath the trees without a care,
Content to sleep, their work well done,
Colors gleaming in the sun.

At other times, they wildly fly
Until they nearly reach the sky.
Twisting, turning through the air
Till all the trees stand stark and bare.
Exhausted, drop to earth below
To wait, like children, for the snow."
— Elsie N. Brady

"If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.
Your school wasn't on fire, you were."
— Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)

"Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower."
— Albert Camus

"Still


In the fall, I believe again in poetry
if nothing else it is
a movement of the mind.
Summers ball together
into sticky lumps,
spring evenings are glass beads from one mould
for standard-size youth,
winter a smooth heaviness, not even cold.
But the mind trembles
here, on the brink
the mind trembles
there is life, after all,
there is life, still
unbelief left."
— Jaakko A. Ahokas (translated from Finnish)

"I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower"
— Albert Camus

"It's September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it."
— Pam Houston (Waltzing the Cat)

"As he walked, the sad faded leaves were driven pitilessly around him by the wind, and under the mingling influences of autumn and evening, a craving for the quietude of the grave … overtook him with unwanted intensity."
— Georges Rodenbach (Bruges-La-Morte)

"Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,
We have our summer evenings, now for October eves!"
— Humbert Wolfe