Mamacita says: Summer is gone and will never return.  No, really, it won’t.  Not that summer.  A new summer will eventually appear but it will be a different one, not the same one.  The same can be said for all four seasons and, in fact, for every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of our lives.  This, too, shall pass?  Yes, indeed it will, good or bad, and it will never come back.  What happens next will be brand new.

Here are some quotations about autumn.  Please note that we do not capitalize the names of the seasons, even though the season are specific times of year.  I do not like this rule, but I was not consulted in the making of it, and can only abide by it lest the universe crack and all the stars are flushed into the wicked, horrifying nothingness that is BAD GRAMMAR.

1. It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. –P.D. James

2. Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all. –Stanley Horowitz

3. I’ve never known anyone yet who doesn’t suffer a certain restlessness when autumn rolls around… We’re all eight years old again and anything is possible. — Sue Grafton

4. Autumn is a season followed immediately by looking forward to spring. –Doug Larson

5. Autumn asks that we prepare for the future—that we be wise in the ways of garnering and keeping. But it also asks that we learn to let go—to acknowledge the beauty of sparseness. –Bonaro W. Overstreet

6. I love the fall. I love it because of the smells that you speak of; and also because things are dying, things that you don’t have to take care of anymore, and the grass stops growing.
— Mark Van Doren

7. Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity;
but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn
on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling
hills that reach to the far horizon? — Hal Borland

8. Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. –Albert Camus

9. She calls it “stick season,” this slow disrobing of summer,
leaf by leaf, till the bores of tall trees rattle and scrape in the wind.– Eric Pinder

10. October is nature’s funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming – October than May. Every green thing loves to die in bright colors. — Henry Ward Beecher

11. Even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn. — Elizabeth Lawrence

12. Fall is not the end of the gardening year; it is the start of next year’s growing season. The mulch you lay down will protect your perennial plants during the winter and feed the soil as it decays, while the cleaned up flower bed will give you a huge head start on either planting seeds or setting out small plants. — Thalassa Cruso

13. Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter. — Carol Bishop Hipps

14. Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time.– William Cowper

15. All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken. –Thomas Wolfe

16. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.– Emily Dickinson

17. How wonderful it would be if we could help our children and grandchildren to learn thanksgiving at an early age. Thanksgiving opens the doors. It changes a child’s personality. A child is resentful, negative—or thankful. Thankful children want to give, they radiate happiness, they draw people. –Sir John Templeton

18. The gloomy months of November, when the people of England hang and drown themselves — Joseph Addison

19. Autumn is marching on: even the scarecrows are wearing dead leaves. –Otsuyu Nakagawa

20. Most people, early in November, take last looks at their gardens, and are then prepared to ignore them until the spring. I am quite sure that a garden doesn’t like to be ignored like this. It doesn’t like to be covered in dust sheets, as though it were an old room which you had shut up during the winter. Especially since a garden knows how gay and delightful
it can be, even in the very frozen heart of the winter, if you only give it a chance. — Beverley Nichols

21. A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives–all bear secret relations to our destinies. — Francois August Rene de Chateaubriand, Vicomte de Chateaubriand

22. How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day! –Samuel Taylor Coleridge

23. Summer ends, and autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night. –Hal Borland

24. Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance. — Yoko Ono

25. The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many. — Oliver Wendell Holmes