autumn
The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and yellows you can’t believe. It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.
Travels with Charley (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 23
I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones. I had forgotten that when you pay attention to the seasons, you are returned to school and all its feelings, the freedom of three o’clock and the nameless dread of Sunday night, when the sky looms over you like the deadline of some paper you haven’t even started. I want to drink cocoa out of a thermos; I want to go to a high school football game.
Priestdaddy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017), 167–68.
My strip is not like the kind that depends on variety or new characters. I’ve got pretty much the same characters and basic idea that I had so many years ago. I want to keep the strip simple. I like it, for example, when Charlie Brown watches the first leaf of fall float down and then walks over and just says, “Did you have a good summer?” That’s the kind of strip that gives me pleasure to do.
Quoted in Barnaby Conrad’s Introduction, in Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2002), 22.
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness then daffodils.
The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea Books, 1981), 17.
The ash has lost its leaves and when I went out to get the mail and stopped to look up at it, I rejoiced to think that soon everything here will be honed down to structure. It is all a rich farewell now to leaves, to color. I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.
Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 34.
It’s the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.
The Blind Assassin (New York: Anchor, 2001), paperback ed., 191.
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
The Writings of George Eliot, vol. 23 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 71.
Autumn comes early to the Vineyard. Leases expire on Labor Day. Flocks of geese start assembling for the flight south.
Summers with Juliet (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992), 13.