Summer Nights Quotes

1. "The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the butt of a melon to tell if it's ripe. and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightening storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on the value of man's having a life of his own, apart from whatever life he has with his family, a private life that no one knows anything about, "a place he can be himself without concern of disappointment or rejection"."
Author: A.M. Homes

2. "Young women looking after a children's summer camp, the ice-cream vendor's horn (his cart is a gondola on wheels, pushed by two handles), the displays of fruit, red melons with black pips, translucent, sticky grapes -- all are props for the person who can no longer be alone. [1] But the cicadas' tender and bitter chirping, the perfume of water and stars one meets on September nights, the scented paths among the lentisks and the rosebushes, all these are signs of love for the person forced to be alone. [2][1] That is to say, everybody.[2] That is to say, everybody."
Author: Albert Camus

3. "We could talk about totally different things. Like the seasons of the year, for example, or even the star-filled sky of these summer nights: I'm interested in stars and nebulas. Maybe you are, too?"
Author: Amos Oz

4. "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."
Author: Craig Childs

5. "The streets of Aqaba are shell spirals and, on summer nights, crowded and complicated as a woman's heart."
Author: Diana Abu Jaber

6. "In those sticky summer nights in South London our windows stay open and our tiny apartment becomes our secret garden. The magic of the secret garden is that it exists in our imagination. There are no limits, no borderlines. The secret garden leads to the marigolds of Mogadishu and the magnolias of Kingston and when the heat turns us sticky and sweet and unwilling to be claimed by defeat we own the night. We own our bodies. We own our lives."
Author: Diriye Osman

7. "The slate black sky. The middle stepof the back porch. And long agomy mother's necklace, the beadsrolling north and south. Brokenthe rose stem, water into drops, glassknob on the bedroom door. Last summer'spot of parsley and mint, white rootsshooting like streamers through the cracks.Years ago the cat's tail, the bird bath,the car hood's rusted latch. Brokenlittle finger on my right hand at birth--I was pulled out too fast. What hasn''tbeen rent, divided, split? Broken the days into nights, the night skyinto stars, the stars into patternsI make up as I trace themwith a broken-off bladeof grass. Possible, unthinkable,the cricket's tiny back as I lieon the lawn in the dark, my harta blue cup fallen from someone's hands."
Author: Dorianne Laux

8. "The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had accumulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved through the passages of his nose and climbed up from there to tickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils, curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights."
Author: Elif Shafak

9. "Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth…It has no day."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

10. "Winter will never come for the likes of us. Should we die in battle, they will surely sing of us, and it's always summer in the songs. In the songs all knights are gallant, all maids are beautiful, and the sun is always shining."
Author: George R.R. Martin

11. "Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights."
Author: Haruki Murakami

12. "Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushroomsin the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell's household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hiding a woman at some country house of his, a foreign woman who has given him a daughter.Whatever you do, he says to Rafe, don't defend my honour. I have women like that all over the place.They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious…Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across me."
Author: Hilary Mantel

13. "But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last."
Author: Jack Gilbert

14. "But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come."
Author: Jack London

15. "My dad was a carpenter and I would work with him during the summer and umpire on the nights I wasn't playing."
Author: Jim Evans

16. "I eye the karaoke machine in alarm.Shit. I'm going to need a shot."Let's do Ssssummer Nightsssss! I jusssst love Greasssse!"Scratch that … I'm going to need a shitload of alcohol before I even think about singing!I turn to Mavis. "Give me everything you've got. If I'm going to sing a ‘Grease' song, I'm not going to do it sober!"
Author: Joanne McClean

17. "The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed - neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica, had eased into the Valley from the industrial region to the north and there were nights when the sun set at the western horizon as if it were sinking through a porous red mass, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained fixed in a single position, prominent in the sky. ("Family")"
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

18. "A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories - of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it's body keeping always longing to be known."
Author: Justin Cronin

19. "Dear God, thank you for warm summer nights and candlelight and good food. But thank you most of all for friends. We appreciate the complicated and wonderful gifts you give us in each other. And we appreciate the task you put down before us, of loving each other the best we can, even as you love us. We pray in Christ's name, Amen."
Author: Kate DiCamillo

20. "The whole thing with Linda and chick at the gas station really got me thinking. My luck had not been so hot with men andit was not as if anyone would know about me placing an ad unless I blabbed. I was not about to do that, well not to everybody, maybe Linda or Danita. "SBF seeks same for a new way to heat up my summer nights. Seeking a sexy, smart surprise for something special."What can I say—I love alliteration."
Author: LaToya Hankins

21. "Gretel in Darkness:This is the world we wanted.All who would have seen us deadare dead. I hear the witch's crybreak in the moonlight through a sheetof sugar: God rewards.Her tongue shrivels into gas....Now, far from women's armsAnd memory of women, in our father's hutwe sleep, are never hungry.Why do I not forget?My father bars the door, bars harmfrom this house, and it is years.No one remembers. Even you, my brother,summer afternoons you look at me as thoughyou meant to leave,as though it never happened.But I killed for you. I see armed firs,the spires of that gleaming kiln--Nights I turn to you to hold mebut you are not there.Am I alone? Spieshiss in the stillness, Hanselwe are there still, and it is real, real,that black forest, and the fire in earnest."
Author: Louise Glück

22. "With this ring, I promise you a strong shoulder to cry on. I promise to hold and care for you whenever you need me. I promise to bring you comfort when you're sad and to defend you to the last. I give you faith, trust and commitment unfailing. I promise to love you with every breath in my lungs and beat of my heart until the end of time. I promise that the only heart I own will always belong to you and it will never beat for another as long I live. I promise picnics in the summer and cozy nights by the fire in winter. I promise to always cherish and appreciate you and everything you do and to show you every day just how much you mean to me. I will always be yours and you will always be mine. This I promise you"
Author: Marie Coulson

23. "A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights.As soon as he'd hit sixty he'd hold his hand out the window,cupping it around the wind. He'd been assuredthis is exactly how a woman's breast feels when you putyour hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew,and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, untilthe weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up.For many years afterwards he was perpetually attemptingto soar. One winter's night, holding his wife's breastin his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep.He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now.As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refusedto abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He oftenpretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings,he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow.He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared."
Author: Mary Ruefle

24. "You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while."
Author: Patrick Rothfuss

25. "...trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound."
Author: Ray Bradbury

26. "I memorized all of "John Carter" and "Tarzan," and sat on my grandparents' front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, "Take me home!" I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities."
Author: Ray Bradbury

27. "The Blue Fly"Five summer days, five summer nights,The ignorant, loutish, giddy blue-flyHung without motion on the cling peachHumming occasionally ‘O my love, my fair one!'As in the canticles.Magnified one thousand times, the insectLooks farcically human; laugh if you will!Bald head, stage fairy wings, blear eyes,A caved-in chest, hairy black mandibles,Long spindly thighs.The crime was detected on the sixth day.What then could be said or done? By anyone?It would have been vindictive, mean, and what-not,To swat that fly for being a blue-fly,For debauch of a peach.Is it fair either, to bring a microscopeTo bear on the case, even in search of truth?Nature, doubtless, has some compelling causeTo glut the carriers of her epidemics -Nor did the peach complain."
Author: Robert Graves

28. "...Summer nights held a special kind of loneliness that gave rise to strange imaginings. One walked the beach alone and thought too much."
Author: Robert Ludlum

29. "It's spring giving way to summer, balmy air smelling of roses, hot skin meeting the cold shock of the ocean, starry nights as warm as kisses."
Author: Sarah McCarry

30. "There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that's a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don't fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything's quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear."
Author: Tove Jansson

31. "[The Edwardian era] was a time of booming trade, of great prosperity and wealth in which the pageant of London Society took place year after year in a setting of traditional dignity and beauty. The great houses—Devonshire, Dorchester, Grosvenor, Stafford and Lansdowne House—had not yet been converted into museums, hotels and flats, and there we danced through the long summer nights till dawn. The great country-houses still flourished in their glory, and on their lawns in the green shade of trees the art of human intercourse was exquisitely practised by men and women not yet enslaved by household cares and chores who still had time to read, to talk, to listen and to think."
Author: Violet Bonham Carter

32. "Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!"
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

33. "The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air."
Author: Wallace Stegner

34. "Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window -- or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls."
Author: Willa Cather

Summer Nights Quotes Pictures