“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honey-sweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cezanne

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn — that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness — that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”
—  Jane Austen, Persuasion

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Notebooks Oct. 10, 1842

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit.”
— George Eliot

Aprils have never meant much to me. Autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.”
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old —
October — November —
How she disliked the cold!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, When the Year Grows Old