Summer afternoon –– summer after noon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

—Henry James

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

—Russell 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

Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing “Embraceable You” in spats.

—Woody Allen

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

—Wallace Stevens

Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.

—Ada Louise Huxtable

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

—Hal Borland

This bud of love by summer’s ripening breath,/ May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.

 —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

 

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

 —John Burroughs

In summer, the song sings itself.

—William Carlos Williams

I don’t know. Sometimes it would stop raining long enough for the stars to come out. Then is was nice… It’s like just before the sun goes to bed down on the bay, those million sparkles on the water… Like that mountain lake, it was so clear, Jenny, it looked like two skies, one on top of the other. And then in the desert when the sun comes up, I couldn’t tell where heaven started and the earth begun. It’s so beautiful… Jenny. I may not be a smart man, but I do know what love is.

 —Forrest Gump