I make ice cream. Ice cream makes people happy.

—Robert (“Dr Mike’s Ice Cream”) Allison

My tongue is smiling.

 —Abigail Trillin, age 4, upon finishing a dish of chocolate ice cream.

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

 

What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.

—Jane Austen

 

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_

Don’t knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while.

—Kin Hubbard_

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

—Annie Dillard_

Summer in New England is earned. We accomplish it through proud endurance. And we accept it as proper wage for the winter we have once again outlasted. Fish are jumping, quail whistle about us, school is out. And while living may not, in fact, be easy, the cinch of limitation is loosened.

 —Robert B. Parker

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

—Nora Ephron

 

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

 

People forget when it is hot here, it is generally hotter still in other places. New York is so situated, with the great ozonic brine on both sides, it comprises the most favorable health-chances in the world. (If only the suffocating crowding of some of its tenement houses could be broken up.) I find I never sufficiently realized how beautiful are the upper two-thirds of Manhattan island.

 —Walt Whitman

 

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

—Edith Wharton

Every flower about a house certifies to the refinement of somebody. Every vine climbing and blossoming tells of love and joy.

 —Robert G. Ingersoll

When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden.

 —Minnie Aumonier

(Each week this column features quotations gleaned from the readings and experiences of our editors, reporters, readers, and friends. All are invited to submit quotations. Send to Gleanings, c/o The Newtown Bee, 5 Church Hill Rd, Newtown, CT 06470 or email to editor@thebee.com.)