By Alyssa Nicole
Summer is a favorite season for many, although I do not include myself in this statement. I am an autumn soul (so much so that I have a maple leaf tattooed on my arm and an orange cat named Pumpkin Waffles) but I do appreciate every season and enjoy what each one has to offer. For me, summer is holiday picnics enjoying my mom’s famous macaroni and potato salads, mango rose sunsets shimmering like spilled paint across Lake Erie, golden lightening bugs bejeweling blades of grass, and evening ice cream excursions. It’s taking day trips to parks and gardens, toasting marshmallows over a blazing campfire, watching fireworks erupt in explosions of vibrancy and of course, reading beneath the dappled shade of an oak tree while sipping a mason jar of lavender lemonade. In literature, important events often play out in these golden months, especially in coming-of-age novels where summer is the setting for growth, change, and new beginnings. It is the season for romance in many a story. Couples finding love beneath the infinite empyrean paradise that is a summer sky. Summer magic can be found in the foaming bubbles of ocean waves kissing the sand, in the kaleidoscopic colors of a carnival or in the glittering stars bursting from a sparkler. It is easy to see why this is the season that receives so many accolades from authors and is perhaps the most popular seasonal setting in stories of all genres. Here are some literary quotes about summertime!
“Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
– Henry James
“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.” – Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird
“Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August.” – Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
– John Lubbock, The Use of Life
“In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible.” ―Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
“The castle grounds were gleaming in the sunlight as though freshly painted; the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake, the satin-green lawns rippled occasionally in a gentle breeze: June had arrived.”
―J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
“All in all, it was a never to be forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which,
in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world.” —L.M. Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date”-William Shakespeare Sonnet 18
“In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.” ― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
“One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”-Jeanette Walls The Glass Castle
Read it or Weep 