The series “Seasonal Expressions” offers tips and helpful quotes to inspire your letters, scrapbooks, and greeting cards. In this article, we share our favorite fall quotes by famous writers, poets, and other creative souls.
If one season can inspire the greatest creative minds, it is fall. Perhaps it’s the sound of crunching leaves beneath the soles of the season’s best boots, porches crowded with gourds, or the aromatic flavors enticing us from the kitchen. The sounds, sights, and scents of autumn have been a source of inspiration for ages.
Don’t take our word for it: When trying to craft the perfect summation to this vibrant season, tap into the best of what’s been written to add the perfect sentiment to your autumn scrapbook, letters, and greeting cards.
64 famous fall quotes by celebrated writers, poets and others
Click on a button to filter by autumnal topic.
“Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting, and autumn a mosaic of them all.”
Stanley Horowitz
Writer
“Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.”
Robert Browning
Poet
“Only lovers / see the fall / a signal end to endings / a gruffish gesture alerting / those who will not be alarmed / that we begin to stop / in order simply / to begin / again.”
Maya Angelou
Poet
“Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me.”
Emily Brontë
Writer
“There’s nothing quite like autumn in New York. But it’s not only the leaves that change. Something in the air brings out the true colors in everyone.”
Gossip Girl
“There is a time of year in New York when…even before the first leaf falls…you can feel the seasons click. The air is crisp, the summer is gone. And for the first night in a long time, you need a blanket on your bed.”
Carrie Bradshaw
Writer
“Autumn… the year’s last, loveliest smile.”
William Cullen Bryant
Poet
“Why, it’s the climax of the year,—The highest time of living!—Till naturally its bursting cheer. Just melts into Thanksgiving.”
Perry Laurence Dunbar
Writer
“Notice that autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Writer
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
Ernest Hemingway
Writer
“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, we have had our summer evenings, now for October eves.”
Humbert Wolfe
Writer
“Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly. They take their time and wander on this their only chance to soar.”
Delia Owens
Writer
“Autumn leaves don’t fall, they fly. They take their time an”October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn!”d wander on this their only chance to soar.”
Rainbow Rowell
Writer
“It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.”
Sarah Addison Allen
Writer
“the lesson of the falling leaves the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves.”
Lucille Clifton
Writer
“I hope I can be the autumn leaf, who looked at the sky and lived. And when it was time to leave, gracefully it knew life was a gift.”
Dodinsky
Writer
“Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”
Nora Ephron
Writer
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
Albert Camus
Philosopher
“How beautifully leaves grow old! How full of light and color are their last days!”
John Burroughs
Writer
“Autumn leaves shower like gold, like rainbows, as the winds of change begin to blow.”
Dan Millman
Writer
“It’s the first day of autumn! A time of hot chocolatey mornings, and toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves!”
Winnie the Pooh
Fictional Character
“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.”
Henry Beston
Writer
“The falling leaves, all over the forest, are protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen, and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your yard. We have only to elevate our view a little to see the whole forest as a garden.”
Henry David Thoreau
Writer
“There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.”
Joe L. Wheeler
Writer
“And the sun took a step back, the leaves lulled themselves to sleep and autumn was awakened.”
Raquel Franco
Writer
“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
Sylvia Plath
Poet
“If you want light to come into your life, you need to stand where it is shining.”
Guy Finley
Writer
“It was a beautiful, bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.”
Diana Gabaldon
Outlander
“October’s poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter.”
Nova S. Blair
Writer
“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
Writer
“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”
Stephen King
Writer
“The little flowers of yesterday. Have all forgotten May. The last gold leaf turned to brown. The last bright day is grey. The cold of winter comes space. And you have gone away.”
Langston Hughes
Writer
“Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.”
J.K. Rowling
Writer
“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
L.M. Montgomery
Writer
“And all at once, summer collapsed into fall.”
Oscar Wilde
Writer
“I love the autumn—that melancholy season that suits memories so well. When the trees have lost their leaves, when the sky at sunset still preserves the russet hue that fills with gold the withered grass, it is sweet to watch the final fading of the fires that until recently burnt within you.”
Gustave Flaubert
Writer
“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.”
John Donne
Poet
“Autumn colors remind us we are all one dancing in the wind.”
Lorin Morgan-Richards
Poet
“Another fall, another turned page.”
Wallace Stegner
Writer
“The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.”
Jane Hirshfield
Writer
“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.”
George Eliot
Writer
“Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.”
Faith Baldwin
Writer
“He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.”
J. R. R. Tolkien
Writer
“The garden of love is green without limit and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy. Love is beyond either condition: without spring, without autumn, it is always fresh.”
Rumi
Writer
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”
Virginia Wolf
Writer
“November is the pearl-grey month, the changeling between warm crimson October and cold white December, the month when the leaves fall in slow drifting whirls, and the shapes of the trees are revealed, when the earth imperceptibly wakes, and stretches her bare limbs and displays her stubborn unconquerable strength before she settles uneasily into winter. November is secret and silent.”
Alison Uttley
Writer
“The leaves are changing; I feel poetry in the air.”
Laura Jaworski
Writer
“Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.”
Lauren Destefano
Writer
“I am such an autumn person. Give me a quiet, cozy spot with a simple view of gorgeous trees with colorful leaves on a crisp September day, fuzzy socks, a warm drink, and a good book and I will be in all my glory.”
McKenna Kaelin
Writer
“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
Ray Bradbury
Writer
“I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Writer
“Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.”
Truman Capote
Writer
“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
Musician
“Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.”
Hal Borland
Writer
“Wild is the music of the autumnal winds amongst the faded woods.”
William Wordsworth
Writer
“A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.”
e.e. Cummings
Poet
“I can smell autumn dancing in the breeze. The sweet chill of pumpkin, and crisp sunburnt leaves.”
Ann Drake
Writer
“Autumn leaves are falling, filling up the streets; golden colors on the lawn, nature’s trick or treat!”
Rusty Fischer
Writer
“Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground.”
Andrea Gibson
Writer
“The bright summer had passed away, and gorgeous autumn was flinging its rainbow-tints of beauty on hill and dale.”
Cornelia Tuthill
Writer
“I loved autumn, the season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it.”
Lee Maynard
Writer
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writer
“Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”
Samuel Butler
Writer
“There is something so special in the early leaves drifting from the trees—as if we are all to be allowed a chance to peel, to refresh, to start again.”
Ruth Ahmed
Writer
“There was a hint of spring in her sole green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.”
Toni Morrison
Writer
