Caspar David Friedrich, “The Summer” (1807), oil on canvas, 71 x 104 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (image via Web Gallery of Art) (click to enlarge)
Come tomorrow, summer.
Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—Henry James
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
—Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays, “Dreams and Facts”
The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
—Mark Twain
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
—Jonathan Swift
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
—Russell Baker
Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.
—Nora Ephron
I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn’t it a pity
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the cityAll around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head—John Sebastian, Mark Sebastian, and Steve Boone, “Summer in the City”
What do I want to take home from my summer vacation? Time. The wonderful luxury of being at rest. The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander. The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are. Summer is my period of grace.
—Ellen Goodman
Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.
—Ada Louise Huxtable
