Sunday, December 21, 2008 – Regarding Winter
Note: Winter Solstice, this date, 4:04 am Pacific Time
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day. ~ Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ~ Andrew Wyeth
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings. ~ Quentin Crisp
Winter is nature’s way of saying, “Up yours.” ~ Robert Byrne
I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood. ~ Bill Watterson
Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966
“Hear! hear!” screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, “winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it.” ~ Henry David Thoreau, 28 November 1858 journal entry
The last day of the old year was one of those bright, cold, dazzling winter days, which bombard us with their brilliancy, and command our admiration but never our love. ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams
It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. ~ G. K. Chesterton, The Wisdom of Father Brown
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. ~ Willa Cather, My Antonia
The problem with winter sports is that – follow me closely here – they generally take place in winter. ~ Dave Barry
I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill. ~ Erma Bombeck
To shorten winter, borrow some money due in spring. ~ W. J. Vogel
There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you…. In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself. ~ Ruth Stout
Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation. ~ Sinclair Lewis
Never take a job where winter winds can blow up your pants. ~ Geraldo Rivera
In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, Long ago. ~ Christina Rossetti, A Christmas Carol
Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm. ~ Ezra Pound. The Ancient Mariner
A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. ~ Carl Reiner
People hit the sauce in a big way all winter. Amidst blizzards they wrestle unsuccessfully with the dark comedy of their lives, laughter trapped in their frigid gizzards. Meanwhile, the mercury just plummets, like a migrating duck blasted out of the sky by some hunter in a cap with fur earflaps. ~ Amy Gerstler, A Severe Lack of Holiday Spirit
Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves. ~ Sylvia Plath, Waking in Winter
Too bad Lassie didn’t know how to ice skate, because then if she was in Holland on vacation in winter and someone said “Lassie, go skate for help,” she could do it. ~ Jack Handy
Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer. ~ Plutarch, Moralia
Just Above Sunset 