The List
‘O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’*
- ‘Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer.’
– Plutarch, Moralia - ‘Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!’
– Ezra Pound - ‘It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver.’
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Land of Mist - ‘There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes’
– Emily Dickinson, ‘No. 258’ - ‘In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.’
– Albert Camus - ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind,
As man’s ingratitude.’
– William Shakespeare - ‘The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.’
– e e cummings - ‘In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.’
– Christina Rossetti, In the Bleak Midwinter - ‘Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.’
– Virginia Woolf, Night and Day - ‘The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?’
– JB Priestley - ‘The trees are stark naked.
Their autumnal clothes
Litter the pavements.
Council sweepers apply fire
Thus creating municipal pyres.
I, Adrian Mole,
Kick them
And burn my Hush Puppies.’
– Adrian Mole, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾
* Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind