Summer Literary Sensations 🌊
It gets misty, the birds sound loud, it smells of irises and then it thunders.
I love such summer storms.
Katherine Mansfield, from a letter written c. July 1921
I enjoy breakfast, the morning light on a church steeple, or on a modern building which looks Grecian against the sky. The summer glow, and my ability to not hear trivial conversation. A sense of space, serenity, and stylization.
Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry c. June 1933
The first summer was pure happiness. I was experiencing another human being, he was experiencing me, and we didn’t need to talk about it. I was barefoot in the sand so fine it was as if it breathed beneath my feet. I never wondered what might come of our relationship. It was as if I were living within soft walls of sunlight and desire and happiness. No summer since has ever been like that. Not like that.
Liv Ullmann, from Liv & Ingmar (2012)
Summer stars burn stories on the sky.
Marilyn Hacker, from “Love, Death & The Changing of the Seasons,”
The rain falling. Summer rain on the earth. Night rain. The darkness and warmth and flood of passion. Tonight the earth is loved – loved and possessed.
James Joyce, from “Exiles; A Play in Three Acts,”
Try sitting at a typewriter one calm summer evening at a table by a window in the country, try pretending your time does not exist, that you are simply you, that the imagination simply strays like a great moth, unintentional, try telling yourself you are not accountable to the life of your tribe, the breath of your planet.
Adrienne Rich, from “North American Time,”
Whomever I love, I love better in winter than in summer.
Friedrich Nietzsche, from “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,”
I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.
Mary Oliver, from New & Selected Poems
I wasted my summer in destructive restlessness, trying to find a way to be comfortable in my life and my skin. Very stupid. I hope you’ll avoid that. Go out. Get some proper hold of your moods. Relax.
Martha Gellhorn, from a letter written c. August 1953
I rush toward you in the summer twilight,
not in the real world, but in the buried one
where you are waiting,
Louise Gluck, from Poems: 1962-2012
A child playing - a summer evening - doors will open and shut, will keep opening and shutting, through which I see sights that make me weep. For they cannot be imparted. Hence our loneliness; hence our desolation. I turn to that spot in my mind and find it empty. My own infirmities oppress me.
Virginia Woolf, from “The Waves,” c. 1931
The remarkable light of the summer evening together with the nocturnal emptiness of the bridge.
Franz Kafka, from a diary entry featured in “Diaries,”
I hate how summer kills me when it appears even briefly.
Arthur Rimbaud, from a letter written c. 1872
Whatever I looked at was alive, everything had a voice, but I never found out whether you were a friend, an enemy, was it winter, summer? Smoke, singing, midnight heat. I wrote thousands of lines. Not one told me.
Anna Akhmatova, from “Fragment, 1959,”
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