Summer Reads Quotes

Nestled in the cabbage leaves,
bunny's snuggly and sound asleep ~ Suzy Davies

Farewell, Timothy Riley's Bar," Lane said softly. "Home of the nickel beer. Snooker emporium. Repository of Bluebird records, three for a dime. We honor you and your passing. Farewell. Farewell, Timothy Riley - and terraplanes and rumbleseats and saddle shoes and Helen Forrest and the Triple-C camps and Andy Hardy and Lum 'n' Abner and the world-champion New York Yankees! Rest in peace, you age of innocence - you beautiful, serene, carefree, pre-Pearl Harbor, long summer night. We'll never see your likes again. ~ Rod Serling

The summer day is closed, the sun is set: Well they have done their office, those bright hours, The latest of whose train goes softly out In the red west. ~ Bear Bryant

We struggle, we grow weary, we grow tired. We are exhausted, we are distressed, we despair. We give up, we fall down, we let go. We cry, we are empty, we grown calm. We are ready. We wait quietly.
A small shy truth arrives. Arrives from without and within. Arrives and is born. Simple, steady, clear. Like a mirror, like a bell, like a flame. Like rain in summer. A precious truth arrives and is born within us. Within our emptiness.
We accept it, we observe it, we absorb it. We surrender to our bare truth. We are nourished, we are changed. We are blessed. We rise up. For this we give thanks.
Short NotesS From The Long History Of Happiness ~ Michael Leunig

He'd fill every moment with the seasons he'd found in his heart: hopes like birds on a spring branch; happiness like a warm summer sun; magic like the rising mists of autumn. And best of all, love; love enough for a thousand Christmases. ~ Clive Barker

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them. ~ Nicholas Meyer

They found a city steaming with heat - 91 degrees on Tuesday, April 27, with four days yet to go until "Straw Hat Day," Saturday, May 1, when a man could at last break out his summer hats. Men followed this rule. A Times reporter did an impromptu visual survey of Broadway and spotted only two straw hats. "Thousands of sweltering, uncomfortable men plodded along with their winter headgear at all angles on their uncomfortable heads or carried in their hot, moist hands. ~ Erik Larson

One always feels the need to wash one's hands after being forced to deal with the methods of U.S. interventionism. It is so unpleasant and filthy that one shudders. When one hears the pious nonsense of the Jewish-led world plutocracy over the radio or reads it in the press, one need only to look behind the scenes to feel pity for the miseries of mankind. That such a man has the impudence to judge us, to call on God and the world as witnesses of the purity of his deeds, to incite war and send innocent people singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" to battle for his filthy financial interests can only fill anyone with even the most primitive sense of decency with the deepest horror. Were there only such people in the world, one would have to despise humanity.

"Mr. Roosevelt Cross-Examined", 30 November 1941 ~ Joseph Goebbels

It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence. ~ Evelyn Waugh

How appealing is my ferocious expression? Appealing like a cool drink on a summer day, or like kittens on a postcard?"
She smiled. He'd delivered the question in his usual bass rumble and she was surprised to realize that she hadn't thought a voice that deep and masculine could actually say words like 'kittens' and 'lovely'. Just like she hadn't thought such a big, ferocious-looking man was capable of such playfulness. 21% ~ Rhyll Biest

Elrond was in his chair and the fire was on his face like summer-light upon the trees. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The summer ends and we wonder who we are And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car And today I passed the high school, the river, the maple tree I passed the farms that made it Through the last days of the century And I knew that I was going to learn again Again, in this less hazy light I saw the fields beyond the fields The fields beyond the field ~ Dar Williams

When summer and winter in autumn divide
The sun will uncover a secret inside.
Should winter from summer irrevocably part
The whole of the book will fall quickly apart.
Yet if the seasons join hands together
The order of things will last forever.
These are the words of Endymion spring.
Bring only the insight the Inside brings.

The child may see what the man does not
A future time which time forgot:
Books yet to be and books already written
Within these pages lie dormant and hidden.
Yet darkness seeks what light reveals
A shadow grows: these truths conceal.
These are my words, Endymion spring.
Bring only the insight the Inside brings.

The silence will end-the sum approaches
Mark my word-the shadow encroaches.
The present had passed-the past has gone
The future will come-once Two become One.
The sun must look the shadow in the eye
Then forfeit the book lest one half die.
The lesion of darkness cannot be healed
Until, with Child's Blood, the whole is sealed.
These are the words of Endymion spring.
Bring only the insight the Inside brings. ~ Matthew Skelton

Now I stand before houses set
on our secret trail, the haunt of arrowheads
and lost Indians the color of small plums,
rooms in which the new boys play, tamed
by computers and a summer waste of games,
where once, in these woods, we tasted wild fruit. ~ Thomas Dukes

When I look out the window, I exhale a prayer of thanks for the color green, for my children's safety, for the simple acts of faith like planting a garden that helped see us through another spring, another summer. And I inhale some kind of promise to protect my kids' hopes and good intentions we began with in this country. Freedom of speech, the protection of diversity - these are the most important ingredients of American civil life and my own survival. If I ever took them for granted, I don't know. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Hey, I got an idea, let's go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let's go and experience the art of the cinema. Let's begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we're gonna have it haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let's go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let's catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we'll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let's lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it's going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let's go see it four times in one year. And let's see Woodstock three times in one year and let's see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let's see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let's sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler's List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema. ~ Tom Hanks

VII"

Oh you can make fun of the splendors of moonlight,
But what would the human heart be if it wanted
Only the dark, wanted nothing on earth

But the sea's ink or the rock's black shade?
On a summer night to launch yourself into the silver
Emptiness of air and look over the pale fields

At rest under the sullen stare of the moon,
And to linger in the depths of your vision and wonder
How in this whiteness what you love is past

Grief, and how in the long valley of your looking
Hope grows, and there, under the distant,
Barely perceptible fire of all the stars,

To feel yourself wake into change, as if your change
Were immense and figured into the heavens' longing.
And yet all you want is to rise out of the shade

Of yourself into the cooling blaze of a summer night
When the moon shines and the earth itself
Is covered and silent in the stoniness of its sleep. ~ Mark Strand

And let them pass, as they will too soon,
With the bean-flowers' boon,
And the blackbird's tune,
And May, and June! ~ Robert Browning

With two eyes you see my face. With three you could see my heart. With two you can see that oak tree there. With three you could see the acorn the oak grew from and the stump that it will one day become. With two you see no farther than your walls. With three you would gaze south to the Summer Sea and north beyond the Wall. ~ George R R Martin

She talks as she sails, the old wooden boat -- of oyster days, and summer bays, and watermen grown old. ~ M. Kei

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy. ~ Aristotle.

Ed Lim's daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she'd grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-order doll catalog as if it were a book–expensive dolls, with n ames and stories and historical outfits, absurdly detailed and even more absurdly expensive.
'Jenny Cohen has this one,' she'd told them, her finger tracing the outline of a blond doll that did indeed resemble Jenny Cohen: sweet faced with heavy bangs, slightly stocky. 'And they just made a new one with red hair. Her mom's getting it for her sister Sarah for Hannukkah.' Sarah Cohen had flaming red hair, the color of a penny in the summer sun. But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique's. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing existed.
He'd gone so far as to write to Mattel, asking them if there was a Chinese Barbie doll, and they'd replied that yes, they offered 'Oriental Barbie' and sent him a pamphlet. He had looked at that pamphlet for a long time, at the Barbie's strange mishmash of a costume, all red and gold satin and like nothing he'd ever seen on a Chinese or Japanese or Korean woman, at her waist-length black hair and slanted eyes. I am from Hong Kong, the pamphlet ran. It is in the Orient, or Far East. Throughout the Orient, people shop a ~ Celeste Ng

And then one student said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can't even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead of under them, although try to sleep is probably more accurate. And then at some point late, late, late at night, say just a bit before dawn, the heat finally breaks and the night turns into cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you're almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it's that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what's warm - whether it's something or someone - toward us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being safe in the world and ready for sleep, that's happiness. ~ Paul Schmidtberger

Ladies, you wake up tomorrow and the newspaper reads Scientists have discovered a way for men to experience childbirth. That would be awesome. ~ Bill Engvall

Summer of 1967 was one of the happiest times of my life. ~ Ron Moody

when I took that first deep breath and saw the clear summer sky, and heard my sister and Little Jimmy and Nora and even Sally and JT cheering for me, I swear I heard the lions roar. Click ~ Kristin Levine

Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young, the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above, it was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting. ~ Mark Twain

Summer has always been my favorite season. I feel happier. ~ Zooey Deschanel

He will break it to her gently, he thinks. A hint, at first; a few more suggestions in letters over the coming months; in September he'll raise the subject. By then...Perhaps he'll have more encouragement from Dr. Hooker by then, which he can offer to Clara as evidence that his work is worthwhile. Perhaps he'll understand by then how he might justify his plans to her. For now - what else can he say in this letter? He has kept too much from her, these last months. If his letters were meant to be a map of his mind, a way for her to follow his trail, then he has failed her. Somehow, as summer comes to these peaks and he does his job for the last time, he must find a way to let her share in his journey. But for now all he can do is triangulate the first few points. ~ Andrea Barrett

A pause. Then she said: "Tell me, Noah, what do you remember most from the summer we spent together?"

"All of it."

"Anything in particular?"

"No," he said.

"You don't remember?"

He answered quietly. "No, it's not that. It's not what you're thinking. I was serious when I said 'all of it.' I can remember every moment we were together, and in each or them there was something wonderful. I can't pick any one time that meant more than any other.

The entire summer was perfect, the kind of summer everyone should have. How could I pick one moment over another?

"Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can't control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense. That's what it was like for me. I didn't plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if you planned on falling in love with me. But once we met, it was clear that neither of use could control what was happening to us. We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created. For me, love like that has happened only once, and that's why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory.

I'll never forget a single moment of it."

Allie stare at him. No one had ever said anything lik that to her before. Ever. She didn't know what to say and stayed silent, her face hot. ~ Nicholas Sparks

When you see these people that are in the public eye all the time, it must get tiring. ~ Donna Summer