Amor Vincit Omnia

“Let’s escape the shalt and shalt not. Let’s dissolve the tension for just one minute. If you want, find a boy with a beautiful mouth to kiss you, pull flowers from the ground and weave them into a crown, escape to the shadows of the woods, forget yourself with someone else, pine needles in your hair, twigs pressed into the meat of your back, dirt against your heels as you thrash, under the trees with the animals, under the stars with the trees. Everything is swelling, blooming, glowing, all about to burst, fertile, verdant, ready, wet.” — Nina MacLaughlin

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” — John Keats

“Summer was another country, where the birds/ Woke us at dawn among the dripping leaves/ And lent to all our fêtes their sweet approval. The touch of air on flesh was lighter, keener,/ The senses flourished like a laden tree/ Whose every gesture finishes in a flower. In those unwardened provinces we dined/ From wicker baskets by a green canal,/ Staining our lips with peach and nectarine,/ Slapping at golden wasps. And when we kissed,/ Tasting that sunlit juice, the landscape folded Into our clasp, and not a breath recalled/ The long walk back to winter, leagues away.” — Adrienne Rich

— “1965″, Zella Day 

“Cool summer nights. Windows open. Lamps burning. Fruit in the bowl. And your head on my shoulder. These the happiest moments in the day. Next to the early morning hours, of course. And the time just before lunch. And the afternoon, and early evening hours. But I do love These summer nights. Even more, I think, than those other times. The work finished for the day. And no one who can reach us now. Or ever.” — Raymond Carver

“Hush, beloved. It doesn’t matter to me how many summers I live to return: this one summer we have entered eternity.” — Louise Gluck

“Suppose I say summer, write the word “hummingbird,” put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you.” — Raymond Carver

“It’s not enough to say the heart wants what it wants. I think of the ravine, the side dark with pines where we lounged through summer days, waiting for something to happen; and of the nights, walking the long way home, the stars so close they seemed to crown us. Once, I asked for your favourite feeling. You said hunger.” — Mary Szybist

“That summer I told you no instead of almost. I should have said very very close.” — Amber McMillan

“In the summer I stretch out on the shore/ And think of you/ Had I told the sea/ What I felt for you,/ It would have left its shores,/ Its shells,/ Its fish,/ And followed me.” — Nizar Qabbani trans. B. Frangieh And C. Brown

“I rush toward you in the summer twilight, not in the real world, but in the buried one where you are waiting.” — Louise Gluck

“My spring melancholy is developing in these hot days into summer madness.” — Virginia Woolf

“The advent of summer makes me sad. It seems that summer’s luminosity, though harsh, should comfort those who don’t know who they are, but it doesn’t comfort me. There’s too sharp a contrast between the teeming life outside me and the forever unburied corpse of my sensations — what I feel and think, without knowing how to feel or think.” — Fernando Pessoa trans. Richard Zenith

— “It’s a Shame”, First Aid Kit 

“Another kind of hurt lodged where happiness had smouldered, another kind of ruin, and summer came.” — Marie Howe

“Here the summer comes out of control burning everything.” —  Nelo Risi trans. Miller Williams

“Summer. These days are no longer mine but the heart is an open shell.” — Ioanna Tsatsou trans. Jean Demos

“Heavy with summer, I am the doe whose one hoof cocks like a question ready to open roots. & like any god-forsaken thing, I want nothing more than my breaths.” — Ocean Vuong

“Never the cries of the gulls, only, in summer, the crickets, cicadas. Only the smell of the field, when all she wanted was the smell of the sea, of disappearance.” — Louise Gluck

“It’s summer. She’s tired. No one knows where she’s been.” — Dorianne Laux

“Summer has been consuming my energy in the most ruthless way.” — Virginia Woolf

“I hate how summer kills me when it appears even briefly.” — Arthur Rimbaud trans. Wyatt Mason

“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

“I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.” — Martha Gellhorn

“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

“My nerves long for the sun, summer, and freedom.” — Hermann Hesse trans. Mark Harman

“Spring was giving way to summer and people getting off work were shedding their jackets, folding them over their forearms to carry. A familiar itch was creeping in. That aching toward something wild–when the days get longer and a walk through the city becomes entirely pleasant from morning to night, when you want to run drunk down an empty street in sneakers and fling all responsibility to the wayside.” — Michelle Zauner

“Well now it’s summer I thought, so let me do something new.” — Sujata Bhatt

“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

“Early summer, idle images. No wind, no wound, the world unpetaled and opened to anyone’s tongue.” — Charles Wright

“And it grows, the vain summer, even for us with our bright green sins.” — Carlo Betocchi trans. Geoffrey Brock

“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

“But — that one summer of bliss. In that kitchen. I was not afraid of burns or scars; I didn’t suffer from sleepless nights. Every day I thrilled with pleasure at the challenges tomorrow would bring. Memorizing the recipe, I would make carrot cakes that included a bit of my soul. At the supermarket I would stare at a bright red tomato, loving it for dear life. Having known such joy, there was no going back.” — Banana Yoshimoto

“It was the summer she threw herself onto her mattress and looked up at the print of Monet’s water lilies hanging above, and broke through the wall to float in the warm water of the paint. She could breathe inside it and thought of Ophelia who never really seemed dead. They were not dead in the water. She was not suffocating with a mouth painted shut painted into a square of blue hung on the wall of a teenage girl.” — Ely Shipley

“This summer I’ll cut my hair off. This summer I’ll be Jeanne D'Arc. I’ll write the script, I’ll play her life. I’ll burn for what I believe.” — Carole Maso

“It is summer and I am in the middle of my life. Alone and happy.” — Linda Gregg

“If it could only be like this always — always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe.” — Evelyn Waugh

“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

“I could sense the persistent violence with which the closed earth was opening up inside as it prepared to give birth, and knew with what burden of sweetness the summer would ripen a hundred thousand oranges, and I knew that those oranges were mine, simply because I wanted it so.” — Clarice Lispector trans. Giovanni Pontiero

— “Vernal Equinox Navels”, Carolyn Lord

“Remember the days of our first happiness, how strong we were, how dazed by passion, lying all day, then all night in the narrow bed, sleeping there, eating there too: it was summer, it seemed everything had ripened at once.” — Louise Gluck

— “Stay Gold”, First Aid Kit

“Deep within everyone’s heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming.” — Irene Nemirovsky trans. Sandra Smith

“That summer we sat with our backs to the street, letting time pass— lying all afternoon in the grass as if green and insect were the world. I am, I am, and you are, you are, we wrote, until the paper seemed a tree again and we walked beneath it greener and unsullied afresh.” — Deborah Landau

“In summer the song sings itself.” — William Carlos Williams

“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music.” — Violette Leduc

“The summer is in me like a readiness for flight, / And I search among the signs / For the flare, polestar, pulley towards the edge.” — Muriel Rukeyser

“The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grows underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire.” — Margaret Atwood

— “Woman with a Parasol”, Claude Monet

“Twilight, then early evening. Fireflies in the room, flickering here and there, here and there, and summer’s deep sweetness filling the open window.” — Louise Gluck

“Dark summer grass. Lightning bugs in their slow flashing. The night above you was more in you than your breath, the stars always shifting in your chest.” — Joanna Klink

“Summer night — even the stars are whispering to each other.” — Kobayashi Issa trans. Robert Hass

“This summer night deep down under the stars was all the things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.” — Ray Bradbury

“”One moment longer,“ whispered solitude and the summer moon, “stay with us: all is truly quiet now; for another quarter of an hour your presence will not be missed: the day’s heat and bustle have tired you; enjoy these precious minutes.”” — Charlotte Bronte

“Sometimes in later summer I won’t touch anything, not the flowers, not the blackberries brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink from the pond; I won’t name the birds of the trees; I won’t whisper my own name. One morning, the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident, and didn’t see me — and I thought: so this is the world. I’m not in it. It is beautiful.” — Mary Oliver

“And it was so good this summer/ To become unaccustomed to my name/ In that almost vineyard silence/ And that reality imitating dream.” — Anna Akhmatova trans. Judith Hemschemeyer

“And it was here, one summer day, I sat down to read an old book. When I looked up from the noon-lit page, I saw a vision of a world about to come, and a world about to go.” — Li-Young Lee

“I write to make you suffer, to dance life before you. Do you see how summer holds me?” — Anne-Marie Kegels trans. Keith Waldrop

“It is summer. The singing grows urgent. Twice a week, sometimes more, I am called from sleep to walk in the night and think of death.” — Mary Oliver

“Some mornings in summer I step outside and the sky opens and pours itself into me as if I were a saint about to die.” — Lisel Mueller

“I want to stay awake for the next three days and nights, drawing the threads of my summer cocoon neatly about me and snipping all the loose ends: to savor until the dying of the last wave, the last dawn, this place, the leaving of which means leaving a great space of living…and aging, aging.” — Sylvia Plath

“We’ll dream of a longer summer but this is the one we have: I lay my sunburnt hand on your table: this is the time we have.” — Adrienne Rich