Winter Quotes

“We use winter as a blank slate, the place where everything is scrubbed away. From the most mystical vision to the most obvious folk use, winter is the climate of imagination. Winter displaces us from the normal cycles of nature so comes our escape into the mind…

Another sense of memory and winter is the memory of winter when it is over. The snows of winter become the tangible sands of the memory clock. Summer supplies the illusion of same time over and over. Winter and cold places supply a sense of past time, and an urge to think about time passing.

Though our setting for all these essays has been winter, our true subject has been time. We share a sense of timeless winter, of eternal winter as the place where time stands still, the poles as places permanently outside of our dailiness, the snow as nature’s secret…we could lose the polar icecaps but would not stop hearing winter music.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“There is a lovely term in botany-vernalization- referring to seeds that can only thrive in spring if they have been through the severity of winter. Without the stress of cold in a temperate climate, without the cycle of seasons, grapes would not be able to make ice wine. If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely…We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no white keys.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“The sign at Starbucks should read “Friends are like snowflakes: more different and beautiful each time you cross their path in our common descent.” For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into every stranger and more complex patterns, until at las they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“Art is a way of expanding our resonances, civilization our way of resonating to those expansions”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“In the Japanese vision of winter, in Japanese poetry, and Japanese prints have an imagery of the “floating world,” where there is no notion that winter has in any way fallen from the hand of God, or is in any way evidence of cosmic organization. The Japanese idea of winter simply speaks of winter as simultaneously empty and full; the emptying out of nature by cold, and it’s also the filling up of the world by wind and snow… the Japanese idea of winter marked the final transformation of winter, and the idea of winter in Europe in the nineteenth century…Monet gets from the Japanese wood block prints a new infatuation with pure white-not a white that’s laid down unvaryingly with a single brushstroke, but instead a white that is made up kaleidoscopically with tiny touches of prismatic color. This is sweet winter at its sweetest, a winter so sweet that it loses the tang of the picturesque and becomes entirely exquisite- not pretty but deeply, renewingly lovely…winter becomes another kind of spring, a spring for aesthetes who find April’s green too common, but providing the same emotional lift of hope, the same pleasure of serene, unfolding slowness; the slow weight of frost, the chromatic varnishing of snow on the boughs of the chestnut tree, the still dawn scene, the semi-frozen river.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“A snow-capped mountain in Switzerland, seen from the comfort of an cabin, can set off a profound chain of thought about ice and ancient history; a gentle snow in the Paris suburbs can create images that show the transience of beauty. The winter window has two sides, one for the watcher and one for the white drifts, and the experience of winter is often not one or the other but both at once.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“In 1799, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge goes to Germany on a winter walking trip and writes home to his wife about the opposite sense: of winter as a mysterious magnetic season that the wanderer is expelled into for his own good, for the purification and improvement of his soul. “What sublime scenery I have beheld!” Coleridge’s’ words are one of those rare passages of prose that truly mark the arrival of an epoch. It would be impossible to find anything like it in European literature only twenty-five years before… This kind of love of the winter scene is not of the force outside pressing in on the window, bringing family together. Instead it is for the ice-spirit pulling us out. This winter window is wrenched open by the level of the sublime.

The new idea (of winter’s beauty) is associated with Edmund Burke’s great essay on the sublime and beautiful from the middle of the eighteenth century. Burke’s was one of the three or four most powerful ideas in the history of thought, because he wrenched aesthetics away from the insipid idea of beauty (physical, manicured) towards recognition of the full span of human sympathy. Oceans and thunderstorms, precipices and abysses, towering volcanoes and, above all, snow-capped mountains- they rival and outdo the heritage of classical beauty exactly because they frighten us; they fill us with fear, with awe, with a sense of the inestimable mystery of the world.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“Winter is the white page on which we write our hearts.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“Though our setting for all these essays has been winter, our true subject has been time. We share a sense of timeless winter, of eternal winter as the place where time stands still, the poles as places permanently outside of our dailiness, the snow as nature’s secret…we could lose the polar icecaps but would not stop hearing winter music.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“The world was once haunted by Titus Oates’s self-made epitaph: “I am going outside and may be some time. Well, we are going inside and may be some time, we are inside, and have been for awhile. The poetry of courage is replaced by the poetry of confinement, the art of the endless open channel overtaken by the art of the perpetually retold tale. Our successful withdrawal from the risks of winter makes for a lessening of its intensities. We have all gone inside, and may be some time.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“The composite quality of Christmas has been part of the holiday…almost certainly long before there was a Christ owed a mas. There has been a mid December holiday to celebrate the winter solstice by appeasing the sun god and assuring the return of spring since people first noticed the sun’s retreat…and the festival is almost always a festival of supplementary light. The light’s going out in the heavens, so we light one here. The Roman Kalends festival of light, greenery, and gift giving. All were recycles by the early Judeo-Christian followers: the act of lighting candles, the practice of giving gifts, even the use of holly and ivy.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“The (musical) Romantics transformed winter from a single, sharp sound heard out of doors to the bright, muffled chromatic keyboard of extended feeling, full of sharps and flat runs, diminished chords and pedal effects. It is certainly, as poets have said, a good thing to see the world in a grain of sand. But it’s an even better one, and more to the purposes of art, to see a single grain of sand in the whole world. Or a single snowflake. The Romantics saw their snowflakes, embraced their glaciers, and remaking our minds, remade our world. A fearful desert had become a new province of the imagination.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“In Schubert’s song “Fruhlingstraum,” you hear the singer, the voice of the wandered in the white wilderness, looking at the frost patterns, the ice blooms, on the window and wondering who placed them there, who is their author? Is it God? Is it man? Are they merely accident? It’s unanswered and unanswerable, and presents the mind again the essential question that winter raises for the Romantic mind, the Romantic imagination: who made winter, and why was it made? Do we project form and meaning onto something that is just an absence, a non-happening of the natural order of warmth and sunshine, or does winter offer some mysterious residual sign of divinity?...”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season

“Perhaps the first unmistakable clear statement of an entirely new and modern attitude towards winter-neither the sporadic excitement of the little ice age nor the depression of the neoclassical attitude- is a poem written towards the end of the eighteenth century by the forgotten British poet William Cowper:

O winter, ruler of the inverted year…
Thy forehead wrapp’d in clouds,
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne
A sliding care, indebted to no wheels
But urged by storms along its slippery way,
I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem’st,
And dreaded as thou art!...
I crown thee king of intimate delights,
Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness,
Of long interrupted evening, know.

It is a change that we tend to coalesce around a philosophical ideal that historians like to call “the picturesque”- turning to nature not as a thing to be feared or even as a thing to seek religious comfort from, but as a thing simply to enjoy, to take pleasure in…. This poem is the first unambiguous declaration of the winter picturesque. With Cowper we’re not simply experiencing an emotion that has never been registered before; in a sense we ae experiencing an emotion that has never been felt before.”
― Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season