Welcome to leaf peepin’ season. For a few months of the year, New England is an autumnal wonderland. The air is crisp, the colors are vibrant, and the apple cider doughnuts are warm. Yes — it is finally time to break out flannel, indulge in pumpkin spice everything, and appreciate nature.
For those of you who do not live here, or have the luxury of visiting, here are some of my personal drool-worthy photos of New England in the fall, along with some quotes, to get you in the mood to GO OUTSIDE!
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
“Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.”
— Jim Bishop
“The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. […] The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.”
— Ray Bradbury
“He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.”
— Emily Brontë
“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonise.”
— George Eliot
“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, we have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!”
— Humbert Wolfe
“There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of Autumn leaves.”
— Joe L. Wheeler
“See it, smell it, taste it, and forget the time of day or year. Autumn needs no clock or calendar.”
— Hal Borland
If the broom fits…