Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.  ––Dame Edith Wharton

 

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

 

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

 

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.                                                     ––Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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

 

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 bigger the summer vacation the harder the fall.

                                                                 ––source unknown

 

Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.    ––Nora Ephron

 

One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space.                                                            ––Rachel Carson

 

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

 

I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles.                 ––Cole Porter

 

Basketball, hockey and track meets are action heaped upon action, climax upon climax, until the onlooker’s responses become deadened. Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams.      ––Roger Kahn

 

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.    ––Sir John Lubbock

 

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you. ––Erma Bombeck

 

(Readers may contribute to Gleanings by sending quotations to Curtiss Clark at PO Box 5503, Newtown or emailing them to editor@thebee.com.)