Sunday, December 8, 2013 – Winter Again
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
Winter is nature’s way of saying, “Up yours.” ~ Robert Byrne
A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. ~ Carl Reiner
Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough. ~ Earl Wilson
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 the time of promise because there is so little to do – or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so. ~ Stanley Crawford
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
To shorten winter, borrow some money due in spring. ~ W. J. Vogel
Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught. ~ Sydney J. Harris
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
There are only two seasons – winter and Baseball. ~ Bill Veeck
People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. ~ Rogers Hornsby
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 lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. ~ Willa Cather
When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night. ~ Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth
Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare upreaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them before it until they loved to run. And what it did to Northern forests can hardly be described, considering that it iced the branches of the sycamores on Chrystie Street and swept them back and forth until they rang like ranks of bells. ~ Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale
The problem with winter sports is that – follow me closely here – they generally take place in winter. ~ Dave Barry
Never take a job where winter winds can blow up your pants. ~ Geraldo Rivera
I grew up thinking of snow as a luxury you visit. ~ John Landis
What, I sometimes wonder, would it be like if I lived in a country where winter is a matter of a few chilly days and a few weeks’ rain; where the sun is never far away, and the flowers bloom all year long? ~ Anna Neagle
I’ve lived in good climate and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate. ~ John Steinbeck
In India, “cold weather” is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. ~ Mark Twain
Genius is an African who dreams up snow. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather. ~ Bill Hicks
There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing. ~ Alfred Wainwright
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. ~ William Blake
Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation. ~ Sinclair Lewis
Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o’clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without. ~ Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Although it was only six o’clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter’s rough poetry. ~ Théophile Gautier, Hashish, Wine, Opium
It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from Saturday and on Sunday she went to the grocery: closed, of course. ~ Truman Capote, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940′s Until Now
In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground’s frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June. Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers – they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night. ~ Jack Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy
Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins. ~ Gustave Flaubert
Just Above Sunset 