Best 1128 quotes in «winter quotes» category

The dollar bills attached to her hips fluttered to the rug of the small square stage, like the first flakes of winter in the Bronx. (Dark City Lights)

The elk that you glimpse in the summer, those at the forest edge, are survivors of winter, only the strongest. You see one just before dusk that summer, standing at the perimeter of the meadow so it can step back to the forest and vanish. You can't help imagining the still, frozen nights behind it, so cold that the slightest motion is monumental. I have found their bodies, half drifted over in snow, no sign of animal attack or injury. Just toppled over one night with ice working into their lungs. You wouldn't want to stand outside for more than a few minutes in that kind of weather. If you lived through only one of those winters the way this elk has, you would write books about it. You would become a shaman. You would be forever changed. That elk from the winter stands there on the summer evening, watching from beside the forest. It keeps its story to itself.

The evening's light, silvery, casts its dull brightness onto the trees--trees gelid in this blue light of winter. But whiteness dominates with the pines and evergreens steeped in vibrant grades of silver. I hear notes in the mist, like silvery chattering, coins in a pocket, the jangle of keys. Pg 217

The exact science of one molecule transformed into another -- that Mabel could not explain, but then again she couldn't explain how a fetus formed in the womb, cells becoming beating heart and hoping soul. She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable?

The Farmer’s Almanac promised a cold winter. The coldest in decades. Andrew grinned, unaware of how hideously ugly it made him. Let the winter be record breaking. The year would be marked in infamy and not for the weather alone. He could imagine the headlines, mentioning it as the winter of death, as his spree was just beginning. It would put the town on the map.

The first snow is like the first love. Do you remember your first snow?

The fullness of life is wrapped in all sacred times: plenty and scarcity; happiness and sadness; planting and harvesting; sunrise and sunset; winter and springtime; summer and autumn; beginning and finishing; birth and death…!

The icicles wreathing On trees in festoon Swing, swayed to our breathing: They’re made of the moon.

The huntsman took pity on her and said, "Run away into the woods, child, and never come back.

Then she smiles, like it's the first time she's seen sun after a decade of winters.

The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon.

The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.

The inherent mystery itself: that elusive brightness that flows out of dreams; the brightness that, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds—I still pursued it almost every morning, in spite of my many hours of tortured sleep.

The most amazing thing about the winter is that even a frozen world may be perceived as a heaven!

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium.

The promise of spring's arrival is enough to get anyone through the bitter winter!

The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said" "This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth." It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.

The other houses in the neighborhood had Christmas lights up and trees visible in their windows, but not Shae's. She and I were the only ones who didn't care anymore, and I liked that about her.

There it was again, the prickling sense of standing on a precipice.

The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture--the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.

There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.

There are no secrets, there is no mystery. We make that all up. In fact, it's all right there in front of us. You have to have enough food to get through winter and spring. That's what it all comes down to. You have to live in a way that will gather enough food each fall to get through winter.

There are winter evenings in Massachusetts when there is no wind and the crust on the snow seems to hold in the cold. And if the moon is three-quarters full, its light adds a kind of warmth to the surrounding earth.

There is an instinctive withdrawal for the sake of preservation, a closure that assumes the order of completion. Winter is a season unto itself.

There's no question winter here can take a chunk out of you. Not like the extreme cold of the upper Midwest or the round-the-clock darkness of Alaska might, but rather the opposite. Here, it's a general lack of severity - monotonous flat gray skies and the constant drip-drip of misty rain - that erodes the spirit.

There's no substitute for a mother's warmth on a wintry night!!!

There's relief in not having to be outside. No gardening, no mowing the lawn, no tyranny of long daylight hours to fill with productive activity. We rip through summer, burning the hours and tearing up the land. Then snow comes like a bandage, and winter heals the wounds.

There was no sound, but she felt a movement, a shifting of the air in her room, the warmth of another presence. Isabel opened her eyes. He was there, at the foot of her bed, a single candle in his hand, dressed only in shirtsleeves, waistcoat, and breeches. “Forgive me,” he whispered as he set the candle down. “I could not stay away.

There was a solace in a snow-laden forest wrapped in night found nowhere else, a loneliness that made me better acquainted with myself.

There was this different quality to the light even only four days past the shortest day; the shift, the reversal, from increase of darkness to increase of light, revealed that a coming back of light was at the heart of midwinter equally as much as the waning of light.

There were, in Feo's experience, five kinds of cold. There was wind cold, which Feo barely felt. It was fussy and loud and turned your cheeks as red as if you'd been slapped, but couldn't kill you even if it tried. There was snow cold, which plucked at your arms and chapped your lips, but brought real rewards. It was Feo's favorite weather: The snow was soft and good for making snow wolves. There was ice cold, which might take the skin off your palm if you let it, but probably wouldn't if you were careful. Ice cold smelled sharp and knowing. It often came with blue skies and was good for skating. Feo had respect for ice cold. Then there was hard cold, which was when the ice cold got deeper and deeper until at the end of a month you couldn't remember if the summer had ever really existed. Hard cold could be cruel. Birds died in midflight. It was the kind of cold that you booted and kicked your way through. And then there was blind cold. Blind cold smelled of metal and granite. It took all the sense out of your brain and blew the snow into your eyes until they were glued shut and you had to rub spit into them before they would blink. Blind cold was forty degrees below zero. This was the kind of cold that you didn't sit down to think in, unless you wanted to be found dead in the same place in May or June. Feo had felt blind cold only once.

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka. And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all.

The sacred time exist in days, weeks, months, seasons and years.

The snow filled the air with a soft grey-blue mist, softening the wind and gunfire, bringing the earth and sky together into one swaying blur. The snow fell on Bach's shoulders; it was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron. This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future.

The season was waning fast Our nights were growing cold at last I took her to bed with silk and song, 'Lay still, my love, I won’t be long; I must prepare my body for passion.' 'O, your body you give, but all else you ration.' 'It is because of these dreams of a sylvan scene: A bleeding nymph to leave me serene... I have dreams of a trembling wench.' 'You have dreams,' she said, 'that cannot be quenched.' 'Our passion,' said I, 'should never be feared; As our longing for love can never be cured. Our want is our way and our way is our will, We have the love, my love, that no one can kill.' 'If night is your love, then in dreams you’ll fulfill... This love, our love, that no one can kill.' Yet want is my way, and my way is my will, Thus I killed my love with a sleeping pill.

The sky was becoming iron, and the trees seemed to rustle uneasily at an unfelt wind, murmuring to one another, Weather is coming.

The sound we hear when it snows is the soft song of the white beauty!

The stark nude trees are old and surviving without attempting modesty.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

The Steadfast Love of the Lord is not Seasonal; His Mercies do not have winter or summer days... They are new every now and then.

The snow starts again in the afternoon: fine flakes at first, but becoming gradually heavier. The world is silent. I watch through the window as it continues to fall. I’m supposed to be working on writing this book, but I am staring at the view out of the window, which is like a giant snow globe. Someone has shaken my world and I’m watching as it rearranges itself.

The summer in you calms the winter in me.

The thought brought a ghost of a smile to his lips. Winter evoked primordial feelings of seeking shelter and fire. The realization of the unforgiving side of mother nature wrapping icy fingers into one’s soul.

The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote for one more hour of light on winter evenings instead of the sudden, extra-early blackout. Whose idea was it to jilt us this way, leaving us in cold November with our unsaved remnants of daylight petering out before the workday ends? In my childhood, as early as that, I remember observing the same despair every autumn: the feeling that sunshine, summertime, and probably life itself had passed me by before I'd even finished a halfway decent tree fort. But mine is not to question those who command the springing forward and the falling back. I only vow each winter to try harder to live like a potato, with its tacit understanding that time is time, no matter what any clock might say. I get through the hibernation months by hovering as close as possible to the woodstove without actual self-immolation, and catching up on my reading, cheered at regular intervals by the excess of holidays that collect in a festive logjam at the outflow end of our calendar.

The truth is, in winter, the earth rejects us.

The warmth of my love will transform winter into spring and adorn you with floral blooms of my heart.

The winter smiling with foggy clouds,and the atmosphere is so damp and cold,dales are covered with rolling mist,white smokey air obscured my crystalline thoughts,yet stop not I writing,decked by giving another flavor to words.

The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning sun; every needle had a brilliant, vitreous case and when she flicked her whip at a wayside shrub she brought down a tinkling shower of ice-leaves, each the veined impression of its crisp, green counterpart.

The wind swept the snow aside, ever faster and thicker, as if it were trying to catch up with something, and Yurii Andreievich stared ahead of him out of the window, as if he were not looking at the snow but were still reading Tonia’s letter and as if what flickered past him were not small dry snow crystals but the spaces between the small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.

They gathered after mass, sang hymns and read. Everyone had grown even more serene; beneath the sisters' kerchiefs it was as if there were no faces. When they met Daryushka — it was as if they bowed down lower. She was walking in the Spirit. Daryushka was entirely serene. She was thinking of nothing, had turned within herself, peering inside; and inside her all was smiling ever so gently. After the storm clear days came, frosty, crackling, clear days. Snow and sky, snow and sky, and the sky was even brighter, whiter, from the snow — and the snow sparkled with blue fires from the sky. Daryushka went down to the river with buckets, to the ice-hole. She went down to the landing alone... Snow, and sky, and brilliance... ("He Has Descended")