With the nights creeping in, the rain getting heavier and the weather getting colder, it’s sometimes hard to feel positive about the arrival of autumn. But writers throughout history have found beautiful ways of describing this “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (Keats was the original #autumninspo). From childhood favourites like Anne Of Green Gables and Harry Potter to literary classics such as The Great Gatsby, here are some the loveliest quotes about autumn from literature. Enjoy.     

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” — F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

’I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.’ ― L M Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.” ― JK Rowling, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.” ― John Donne, The Autumnal 

“Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies.” ― Nora Ephron, You’ve Got Mail

“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, Letters on Cézanne

“And I rose / In rainy autumn / And walked abroad in a shower of all my days…” ― Dylan Thomas, Poem In October

“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, Persuasion

“Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.”

― Robert Browning, Andrea Del Sarto

“It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.”

― PG Wodehouse, Jeeves And The Old School Chum

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