Sunday, July 1, 2012 – July Heat
At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are. ~ Czeslaw Milosz
The good Lord made us all out of iron. Then he turns up the heat to forge some of us into steel. ~ Marie Osmond
It ain’t the heat; it’s the humility. ~ Yogi Berra
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air – moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh – felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. ~ Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o’clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There’s no hurry, for there’s nowhere to go and nothing to buy… and no money to buy it with. ~ Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk. ~ Pat Conroy
I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips. ~ Violette Leduc
God, it was hot! Forget about frying an egg on the sidewalk; this kind of heat would fry an egg inside the chicken. ~ Rachel Caine
Heat, ma’am! it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones. ~ Sydney Smith, Lady Holland’s Memoir
One upside of the heat. Kind of cool to see a cat pant. ~ Jonah Goldberg
The heat made people crazy. They woke from their damp bedsheets and went in search of a glass of water, surprised to find that when their vision cleared, they were holding instead the gun they kept hidden in the bookcase. ~ Kristin Hannah, Summer Island
I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips. ~Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it. ~ Russel Baker
A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken. ~ James Dent
A man says a lot of things in summer he doesn’t mean in winter. ~ Patricia Briggs
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance ~ Jane Austen
Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing. ~ Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability. ~ Sam Keen
You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4th, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. ~ Erma Bombeck
A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins. ~ Laurie Colwin
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers. ~ Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen. ~ Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter
Sophia and Grandmother sat down by the shore to discuss the matter further. It was a pretty day, and the sea was running a long, windless swell. It was on days just like this – dog days -that boats went sailing off all by themselves. Large, alien objects made their way in from sea, certain things sank and others rose, milk soured, and dragonflies danced in desperation. Lizards were not afraid. When the moon came up, red spiders mated on uninhabited skerries, where the rock became an unbroken carpet of tiny, ecstatic spiders. ~ Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
Kansas afternoons in late summer are peculiar and wondrous things. Often they are pregnant, if not over-ripe, with a pensive and latent energy that is utterly incapable of ever finding an adequate release for itself. This results in a palpable, almost frenetic tension that hangs in the air just below the clouds. By dusk, spread thin across the quilt-work farmlands by disparate prairie winds, this formless energy creates an abscess in the fabric of space and time that most individuals rarely take notice of. But in the soulish chambers of particularly sensitive observers, it elicits a familiar recognition – a vague remembrance – of something both dark and beautiful. Some understand it simply as an undefined tranquility tinged with despair over the loss of something now forgotten. For others, it signifies something far more sinister, and is therefore something to be feared. ~ P. S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England. ~ Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Just Above Sunset 