The best literary quotes about summer

It’s a time of seemingly endless daylight, carefree fun and lazy afternoons with friends. Adventures big and small hide around every corner, and optimism hangs in the air. So, of course, summer feels like a strong contender for the best season of all.

Don’t take our word for it though; some of literature’s most famous quotes have been inspired by the sunniest months of the year. Here, we’ve rounded up 12 of the best.

“I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.”

– L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.”

– John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

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

– Henry James

“I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.”

– Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.”

– Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August.”

– Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”

– Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“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.”

– John Lubbock, The Use of Life

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”

– Tove Jansson

“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”

– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”

– William Shakespeare, The Sonnets