c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
She deigned to asked me how ice queens reproduce. I grinned, and her mother looked horrified.“We procreate by way of ice cubes, of course. We put them in our nests and let them incubate for the period of about four months, and when the temperature is right, we put them out to roost and let them flake off into billions of snowflakes, rather like tadpoles breaking in droves from their eggs. And that, child,” I said, with a simulacrum of glee, “is how winter is born.”“Does it hurt?”“No more than the approach of Monday does to most of the world. It is a natural process, you understand, but it is dreadful hard work.
— Michelle Franklin
But was the woman's death the tragedy, or her life?
— Marissa Meyer, Stars Above
Now is the time of fresh startsThis is the season that makes everything new.There is a longstanding rumor that Spring is the timeof renewal, but that's only if you ignore the depressingclutter and din of the season. All that floweringand budding and birthing--- the messy youthfulnessof Spring actually verges on squalor. Spring is too busy,too full of itself, too much like a 20-year-old to be the best time for reflection, re-grouping, and starting fresh. For that you need December. You need to have lived through the mindless biological imperatives of your life (to bud, and flower, and show off) before you can see that a landscape of new fallen snow is THE REAL YOU.December has the clarity, the simplicity, and the silence you need for the best FRESH START of your life.
— Vivian Swift, When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler's Journal of Staying Put
It seems like everything sleeps in winter, but it's really a time of renewal and reflection.
— Elizabeth Camden, Until the Dawn
It's so hard to think in winter. The world seems confined in the space of your heart
—  you can't see beyond yourself.
The tall blue spruce trees surrounding the church stood like ancient prophets in white gowns and a peregrine falcon that had taken up residence in the belfry perched on a ledge keeping an eye out for wandering mice.
— Kathleen Valentine, The Whiskey Bottle in the Wall: Secrets of Marienstadt
Even if I believed I was doing good- for who I am to presume what is good for others?
— Marissa Meyer
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
— Elizabeth Bowen
If we had no winter the spring would not be so pleasant.
— Anne Bradstreet
Can a rose survive in winter?
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney, The Rose and the Sword
And after winter folweth grene May.
— Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
Buds in the snow—the deadly fightbetween two birds
— Jack Kerouac, Book of Haikus
Thus unto winter’s chill embrace I turnWho once the summer’s sun did blithely bide ‘Neath solemn visage cold and fair and sternIn her cool breast my hot heart to confide.Denied the warmth and wit of summer’s sun Or springtime’s strength, and bright, melodious song I dreamed not to complete what I’d begun Nor dared to haste the laggard hours along.But now with spring and summer sun at rest Laid bare before bright winter’s pale charms I would for love of her lay down my quest And take my ease in Winter-Lady’s arms.Before her beauty fair ‘neath snow-swept sky All other seasons blanch and fade, and die.- The Lost Knight's Lament, "Winter's Lady" (Forthcoming)
— D. Alexander Neill
I’d thought there’d be no winter in the desert, but winter arrived anyway—silently, suddenly.
— You Jin, Death by Perfume
Щом зима се озъби паки камък пука в леден мрак,замръзва вир, замръзва лес —не тръгвай в Пущинака днес!When winter first begins to biteand stones crack in the frosty night,when pools are black and trees are bare,’tis evil in the Wild to fare.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Cold is cold.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I will accept this side effect. I will accept any amount of monsters my mind wants to give me, but I will not become a monster myself
— Marissa Meyer, Stars Above
But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back" - almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour - the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white Mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revalation and wonder.
— L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
Jacin’s fingers curled around his knife. It was torture. Jacin looked more afraid than when he’s stood on trial. More afraid than when his torso had been stripped raw from the lashings. This was the last time she would ever see him. This was her last moment. Her last breath. Suddenly, all of the politics and all of the games stopped mattering. Suddenly, she felt daring. “Jacin,” she said, with a shaky smile. “You must know. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t love you. I don’t think such a time ever existed.”His eyes filled with a thousand emotions. But before he could say whatever he would say, before he could kill her, Winter grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and kissed him. He thawed much quicker than shed expected. Almost instantly, like he’d been waiting for this moment, he grabbed her hips and pulled her against him with a possessiveness that overwhelmed her. His lips were desperate and starved as he leaned into the kiss, pressing her against the rail. She gasped, and he deepened the kiss, threading one hand into the hair at the nape of her neck. Her head swam, muddles with heat and a lifetime of desire. Jacin’s other hand abandoned her hip. She heard the ring of steel as the knife was pulled from its scabbard. Winter shuddered and kissed him harder, filling it with every fantasy she’d ever had. Jacin’s hand slipped out of her hair. His arm encircled her. He held her against him like he couldn’t get close enough. Like he meant to absorb her body into his. Releasing his shirt, Winter found his neck, his jaw. She felt the tips of his hair on her thumbs. He made a noise and she couldn’t tell if it was desire or pain or regret or a mix of everything. His arm tensed against her back. His weight shifted as he raised the knife.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
Jacin said nothing else. Neither did she. After the first ring was completed, she leaned her head against his thigh, making herself more comfortable as she picked out a sunburst orange. Overhead, Jacin sighed, and she felt the faintest brush of fingertips against her hair. A hint, a suggestion of togetherness, before he became a statue once more.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
I haven't used my glamour since I was twelve years old,” she whispered, gaze piercing as if it were very important to her that Scarlet understand this. “Not since I was old enough to control it. That's why the visions come to me. That's why I'm going mad.
— Marissa Meyer, Cress
Winter shook her head, apology swimming in her amber eyes. Scarlet would have wanted to hug her if she hadn’t simultaneously wanted to strangle her.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
There's relief in not having to be outside. No gardening, no mowing the lawn, no tyranny of long daylight hours to fill with productive activity. We rip through summer, burning the hours and tearing up the land. Then snow comes like a bandage, and winter heals the wounds.
— Jerry Dennis
I love winter. The bugs are dead, and the people are indoors.
— Dennis Ruane
I kill the living to make way for the dead.But we had hot chocolate, she and I. We tried to make our friendship last as long as we could.Then I was forced to let her go. I held her when she returned to the earth.
— R.A. Parry, James Dean Rode a Unicorn: A Fantastical Collection of Short Fiction
Don't complain it's too cold now if you also intend to whine about how hot it is when summer comes. It's just hypocritical.
— James Marquess, Stem: A Novella
Hogsmeade looked like a Christmas card
—  the little thatched cottages and shops were all covered in a layer of crisp snow
Snow is snow.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The dollar bills attached to her hips fluttered to the rug of the small square stage, like the first flakes of winter in the Bronx. (Dark City Lights)
— Tom Callahan
She would be brave. She would be heroic. She would make her own destiny.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
This is Winter," said Scarlet. "Princess Winter."Thorne guffawed and pushed a hand into his hair. "Are we running a boardinghouse for misplaced royalty around here, or what?
— Marissa Meyer, Cress
You are the capital U in Unhelpful.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
WINTER SPOILER KINDACinder stared at his whitened knuckles and struggled for something meaningful to say. Her grand plan of revolution and change had just begun and already she felt like a failure. This seemed worse than failing the people of Luna, though. She'd failed the people she cared about most in the universe.Finally, she whispered, "I'm so sorry, Thorne.""Yeah," he said. "Me too.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
The huntsman took pity on her and said, "Run away into the woods, child, and never come back.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
So much importance pressed into so few words. It was just like Jacin.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
WINTER SPOILER - KINDA IDRKCinder looked away. Though so much had changed between them since that night, it still felt like an ice pick in her heart when she remembered the way he'd looked at her, and his horrified words: You're even more painful to look at than she is.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
The young princess was as beautiful as daylight. She was more beautiful even than the queen herself
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
She was not a girl of ice and glass at all, but a girl of sunshine and stardust.
— Marissa Meyer
She screamed like an assassin was driving a knife into her stomach.She screamed like a thousand birds were pecking at her flesh.She screamed like the palace was burning down around her.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
Levana's face was fiercely beautiful. Breathtaking in her viciousness.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
I'll be your blanket, baby. Wrap yourself up in me. Let me give you shelter, in the winter of this world.
— John Mark Green
To say goodbye, is to die a little.To say good morning, is a hope for a new sunshine in a cloudy winter.
— Nabil TOUSSI
There is an instinctive withdrawal for the sake of preservation, a closure that assumes the order of completion. Winter is a season unto itself.
— Haruki Murakami
The cold seemed less relentless now. The small circle of white light from my bedside lamp and its hint of the dawn to come seemed to drive the worst of the chill away and the hot tea did the rest, as I lay and read further into the life of the young woman in the bravado coat.
— Jane Lovering, The Art of Christmas
It was a black and white day of frost, which crawled along the dark trees and outlined twig and branch. The air was misty, and distant objects assumed a mysterious importance. Slight sounds, too, suggested infinite activities to the mind.("A Tribute Of Souls")
— Robert S. Hichens
You've fought for Winter so spectacularly, and I am more proud than I have ever been to call you my son. But don't forget to fight for yourself as well--there is no shame in that
— Sara Raasch, Ice Like Fire
No, I don't miss you... Not in a way that one is missed.But I think of you. Sometimes.In the way that one might think of the summer sunshineOn a winter night...
— Sreesha Divakaran, Those Imperfect Strokes
December, being the last month of the year, cannot help but make us think of what is to come.
— Fennel Hudson, A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1
In the summer heat the reapers say, “We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?
— Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises
People make a great deal of the flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn, but for me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best -- and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow. I do not understand people who find a winter evening forbidding.
— Murasaki Shikibu
The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape.("The Triumph Of The Night")
— Edith Wharton, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
I stood on the old ferry dock and watched the icy sludge slide by. Patches of white ice slipped through, but mostly it was grey slush, sluggish and heavy looking. The air was sharp and clear, one of the few benefits of the evacuation and reducing temperature, the centuries-old odour of industry and modern life frozen and discarded, leaving a crispness previously only found among the peaks of mountain ranges. On the far bank stood the ruins of Birkenhead, where the riots had been particularly bad and the fires that followed were allowed to rage out of control. It had taken weeks for the conflagration to finally die, leaving behind soot-blackened husks of buildings, grotesque sculptures of melted glass and metal and more dead than anyone ever cared to count.
— Neil Davies, Hard Winter The Novel
You have to feel the bite of the wind to appreciate the warmth of a winter coat.
— Fennel Hudson, A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1
The summer in youcalms the winter in me.
— Saiber, The Summer in You
I've lived to see my longings die"I've lived to se my longings die:My dreams and I have grown apart;Now only sorrow haunts my eye,The wages of a bitter heart.Beneath the storms of hostile fate,My flowery wreath has faded fast;I live alone and sadly waitTo see when death will come at last.Just so, when the winds in winter moanAnd snow descends in frigid flakes,Upon a naked branch, alone,The final leaf of summer shakes!
— Alexander Pushkin
In the spring and summer I watched my plants flower, but it was, perhaps, in winter that I loved them best, when their skeletons were exposed. Then I felt they had more to say to me, were not simply dressing themselves for the crowds. Stripped of their leaves, their identities showed forth stark, essential.
— Pamela Erens, The Understory
The exact science of one molecule transformed into another -- that Mabel could not explain, but then again she couldn't explain how a fetus formed in the womb, cells becoming beating heart and hoping soul. She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable?
— Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child
Snake's LullabyBrother, sister, flick your tongueand taste the flakes of autumn sun.Use these last few hours of goldto travel, travel toward the cold.Before your coils grow stiff and dull,your heartbeat slows to winter's lull,seek the sink of sheltered stonesthat safely cradle sleeping bones.Brother, sister, find the waysback to the deep and tranquil bays,and 'round each other twist and foldto weave a heavy cloak of cold.
— Joyce Sidman, Winter Bees & Other Poems of the Cold
As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.
— Carolyn Jess-Cooke, The Guardian Angel's Journal
They gathered after mass, sang hymns and read. Everyone had grown even more serene; beneath the sisters' kerchiefs it was as if there were no faces. When they met Daryushka — it was as if they bowed down lower. She was walking in the Spirit.Daryushka was entirely serene. She was thinking of nothing, had turned within herself, peering inside; and inside her all was smiling ever so gently.After the storm clear days came, frosty, crackling, clear days. Snow and sky, snow and sky, and the sky was even brighter, whiter, from the snow — and the snow sparkled with blue fires from the sky.Daryushka went down to the river with buckets, to the ice-hole. She went down to the landing alone... Snow, and sky, and brilliance...("He Has Descended")
— Zinaida Gippius, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
Oh, how magical it will be to have winter come every year.
— Clara Troltenier, The Diary of Aision-Gioro Puyi
The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season.
— Angela Carter, Saints and Strangers
Snow is diamonds for a faery's feet;Blithely and bonnily she trips along,Her lips a-carol with a merry song,And in her eyes the meaning... Life is sweet!
— Ruby Archer
She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became cold and short and dark. Living things hid themselves away. Spring came when she was released and made her slow way up to the world again. The world became brighter and bolder in order to welcome her back. It began to be filled with warmth and light. The animals dared to wake, they dared to have their young. Plants dared to send out buds and shoots. Life dared to come back.
— David Almond, Skellig
We experience a discomfort that may be foreign to others, but that pain opens up a world of beauty. Wouldn't you think?
— Craig Thompson, Blankets
Dream of the Tundra SwanDusk felland the cold came creeping,cam prickling into our hearts.As we tucked beaksinto feathers and settled for sleep,our wings knew.That night, we dreamed the journey:ice-blue sky and the yodel of flight,the sun's pale wafer,the crisp drink of clouds.We dreamed ourselves so far aloftthat the earth curved beneath usand nothing sang but a whistling vee of light.When we woke, we were covered with snow.We rose in a billow of white.
— Joyce Sidman, Winter Bees & Other Poems of the Cold
The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning sun; every needle had a brilliant, vitreous case and when she flicked her whip at a wayside shrub she brought down a tinkling shower of ice-leaves, each the veined impression of its crisp, green counterpart.
— Evelyn Waugh, Helena
…to celebrate by making love the first snow of winter.
— R.A.Lucas
But winter was necessary. Why else would the world have it? The trees seemed to welcome the season, from the way they changed colors before they dropped their leaves and went to sleep. Winter was a part of a cycle, like day and night, life and death.
— Merrie Haskell, The Castle Behind Thorns
Winter gold: the sparrow's footprints in the snow.
— Marty Rubin
The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture--the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulnessin their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.
— Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
sleeping beauty/trips me with a frown
— Tori Amos
Twenty-five, he was. Twenty-five tomorrow. Some years the snow had melted for his birthday, but not this year, and so it had been a long winter full of cows.
— Jane Smiley
Winter is not a season, it's a celebration.
— Anamika Mishra
I was washing outside in the darkness,the sky burning with rough stars,and the starlight, salt on an axe-blade.The cold overflows the barrel.The gate's locked,the land's grim as its conscience.I don't think they'll find the new weaving,finer than truth, anywhere.Star-salt is melting in the barrel,icy water is blackening,death's growing purer, misfortune saltier,the earth's moving nearer to truth and to dread.
— Innokenty Annensky, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
Got nothing to say now, huh? Figures." She snorted. Hearing voices was one thing, but talking back to them probably hiked her up to a whole new level of psychosis. Awesome.
— Laura Kaye, North of Need
As long as there exist summer, we shall love the winter! The day summer disappears from Earth, we shall hate the winter!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Beautiful winter means beautiful spring! When you look at a great winter scenery, see the flowers, see the bees, see the butterflies, they are all there!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
And just like a midsummer nights breeze, she ran away, into the moonlight, a fox, proud and strong. The lone wolf walked away, saddened she was gone.
— Jason Winchester
They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.
— T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone
Groundhog found fog. New snows and blue toes. Fine and dandy for Valentine candy. Snow spittin'; if you're not mitten-smitten, you'll be frostbitten! By jing-y feels spring-y.
— Old Farmer's Almanac
Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.
— David Goodis, Of Tender Sin
It was Christmas Eve. Big snowflakes fluttered slowly through the air like white feathers and made all of the Heavenly Valley smooth and white and quiet and beautiful.Tall fir trees stood up to their knees in snow and their outstretched hands were heaped with it. Those that were bare of leaves wore soft white fur on their scrawny, reaching arms and all the stumps and low bushes had been turned into fat white cupcakes.
— Betty MacDonald, Nancy and Plum
Snow harder! Snow more!Snow blizzards galore!I can’t get enoughOf the fluffy white stuff!Snow! Snow! Snow!Snow a ton! Snow a heap!Snow ten feet deep!I wouldn’t cryIf it snowed til July.Snow! Snow! Snow!
— Paul F. Kortepeter, The Holly Pond Hill Christmas Treasury
The snow came up to the top of Georgie's calves - she had to lift her feet high to make any progress. Her ears and eyelids were freezing...God, she'd never even been able to imagine this much cold before. How could people live someplace that so obviously didn't want them?
— Rainbow Rowell, Landline
Wisconsin doesn't look kindly on the weeks that slip in between the death of cold and the birth of warmth; Persephone may have left her husband, but she isn't home yet, and this is one state that'll be damned before it lets anyone forget it.
— Seanan McGuire, Sparrow Hill Road
To survive the Canadian winter, one needs a body of brass, eyes of glass, and blood made of brandy.
— Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce Lahontan
In spring we are on Earth; in summer we are on Earth; in autumn we are on Earth, but in winter we are in another planet; winter is another planet!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
By lunchtime the valley was lightly coated, like a cake with confectioner's sugar...there was white fur on the antlers of the iron deer and on the melancholy boughs of the Norway spruce.
— Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake
...Following the bird you lay into a deep turn in the steepening descent. It [the snow] is super soft, bottomless and amazingly light, yet supportive. It feels like something in between floating on top, and within the top of a deep-pile carpet as you link turn after turn down the open glacier. Each side of you are fellow riders, though not too close, whooping with exhilaration and flying down, down towards the valley below. The pitch gets steeper and the slope widens out, with seemingly endless space to the sides and an untracked oblivion ahead and beneath you. Each turn is delicious softness; you can almost feel every snow crystal reacting with the base of your skis. Those skis feel like extensions of your feet, and you connect with the mountain through a portal link created by the snowpack, as the spray from the turn hangs in the air behind you...
— Steve Baldwin, Snow Tales and Powder Trails: Adventures on Skis
Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest
—  it is an industry.
Winter brings cold dry harsh weather and trees are without leaves.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Wintry it ain't- no complaints! Snowier: Storefronts are showier, light displays glowier. Shoppers are prowling, blizzard howling! Drifts a-heaping, lords a-leaping, Yule logs burning, gifts returning. Winds are keen for 2015!
— The Old Farmer's Alamanac
Oh deep winter snow, pale executioner, thou who delights in a slow, torturous death.
— T.R. Neff, The Falconer and The Wolf
I hate winter. I’ve lived in Syracuse my whole life and I hate winter. It starts too early and ends too late. No one likes it.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
At my place I can really tell when winter has come.. It's when sunlight is pathetically crawling in my courtyard, incapable of reaching my window anymore.
— Boulet
Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold
— Robert M. Pirsig
Idris had been green and gold and russet in the autumn, when Clary had first been there. It had a stark grandeur in the winter: the mountains rose in the distance, capped white with snow, and the trees along the side of the road that led back to Alicante from the lake were stripped bare, their leafless branches making lace-like patterns against the bright sky.Sometimes Jace would slow the horse to point out the manor houses of the richer Shadowhunter families, hidden from the road when the trees were full but revealed now. She felt his shoulders tense as they passed one that nearly melded with the forest around it: it had clearly been burned and rebuilt. Some of the stones still bore the black marks of smoke and fire. “The Blackthorn manor,” he said. “Which means that around this bend in the road is …” He paused as Wayfarer summited a small hill, and reined him in so they could look down to where the road split in two. One direction led back toward Alicante — Clary could see the demon towers in the distance — while the other curled down toward a large building of mellow golden stone, surrounded by a low wall. “ … the Herondale manor,” Jace finished.The wind picked up; icy, it ruffled Jace’s hair. Clary had her hood up, but he was bare-headed and bare-handed, having said he hated wearing gloves when horseback riding. He liked to feel the reins in his hands. “Did you want to go and look at it?” she asked.His breath came out in a white cloud. “I’m not sure.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
There was a filmy veil of soft dull mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects, giving them a lilac hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was singing ... The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them all low to the ground. Already one or two kept constantly floating down, amber and golden in the low slanting sun-rays.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.Not that year.Winter hung in there, like an invalid refusing to die. Day after grey day the ice stayed hard; the world remained unfriendly and cold.
— Neil Gaiman, Odd and the Frost Giants
It seemed my wholelife was composed of these disjointedfractions of time, hanging around in onepublic place and then another, as if I werewaiting for trains that never came. And, likeone of those ghosts who are said to lingeraround depots late at night, askingpassersby for the timetable of the MidnightExpress that derailed twenty years before, Iwandered from light to light until thatdreaded hour when all the doors closed and,stepping from the world of warmth andpeople and conversation overheard, I feltthe old familiar cold twist through my bonesagain and then it was all forgotten, thewarmth, the lights; I had never been warmin my life, ever.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Winter is coming, warned the Stark words, and truly it had come to them with a vengeance. But it is high summer for House Lannister. So why am I so bloody cold?
— George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
How could it be winter without snow?I appreciated every season, but winter was my favorite.I loved when it was time to pull out my thick sweaters.I loved the smell of a wood fire.I loved skiing and snow boarding and sledding, when i could find the time-although time was in a short supply when school was in session.I even enjoyed the cold, wintry weather, it was great for snuggling.
— Rachel Hawthorne, Suite Dreams
I am in no mood to fulminate on paper--I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth.
— Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard
Maybe nature is like you and me. It works like all of us. If the weather changes all the time,then it must be on duty. On this cold day winter has started it's shift therefore let us leave it to do it's job.
— Paballo Seipei
The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said" "This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth." It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.
— Willa Cather
After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured.
— George Orwell, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
Ah for pittie, wil ranke Winters rage,These bitter blasts neuer ginne tasswage?The keene cold blowes throug my beaten hyde,All as I were through the body gryde.My ragged rontes all shiver and shake,As doen high Towers in an earthquake:They wont in the wind wagge their wrigle tailes,Perke as Peacock: but nowe it auales.
— Edmund Spenser, The Shepherd's Calendar and Other Poems
Summer fell upon Paris, with everyone still intently following his own subterranean course of passion or habit and looking up like a startled creature of the night at the blazing June sun. Now, all of a sudden, there was an impelling necessity to go away, to give a continuation or a meaning to the winter that had just gone by.
— Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an
Endure the cold, and true love will follow.
— Rosca Marx, Wake Norway
At least until there are new lakes in the clouds that open upon living cities as yet unknown, and perhaps forever, that is a question which you must answer within your own heart.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone.
— William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.
— John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter
Winter is a season we all wish to start and end soon.
— Karen Zirbes
It was snowing when I got off the bus at Flax Hill. Not quite regular snowfall, not exactly a blizzard. This is how it was: The snow came down heavily, settled for about a minute, then the wind moved it - more rolled it, really - onto another target. One minute you were covered in snow, then it sped off sideways, as if a brisk, invisible giant had taken pity and brushed you down.
— Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird
No. She will never be queen.” She swayed toward him, and he felt like he was being encircled by a python, smothered and choked.
— Marissa Meyer, Winter
Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered...sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks...
— Ray Bradbury
...I'm just beginning to understand how kind you are.
— Felix Salten, Bambi
Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.
— Victor Hugo
If winter helps you curl up and more that makes it one of the best of the seasons.
— Murray Pura
The snow filled the air with a soft grey-blue mist, softening the wind and gunfire, bringing the earth and sky together into one swaying blur.The snow fell on Bach's shoulders; it was as though flakes of silence were falling on the still Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron.This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
The promise of spring's arrival is enough to get anyone through the bitter winter!
— Jen Selinsky
You are my winter suddenness—a glass of red wine spilt across a white tablecloth
— John Geddes
Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.
— Steven Millhauser, Little Kingdoms
The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian airports- to break the icy seal. Stepping outside was like stepping onto another planet, for at those low temperatures nothing seems quite normal. The air burns. Sounds are brittle. Every breath hovers in a strangle slow-motion cloud, adding to the mist of ice that pervades the city and blurs the sun. When the breath freezes into ice dust and falls almost silently to the ground, Siberians call it the whisper of stars.
— David K. Shipler, Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams
She looked at the produce stalls, a row of jewels in a case, the colors more subtle in the winter, a Pantone display consisting only of greens, without the raspberries and plums of summer, the pumpkins of autumn. But if anything, the lack of variation allowed her mind to slow and settle, to see the small differences between the almost-greens and creamy whites of a cabbage and a cauliflower, to wake up the senses that had grown lazy and satisfied with the abundance of the previous eight months. Winter was a chromatic palate-cleanser, and she had always greeted it with the pleasure of a tart lemon sorbet, served in a chilled silver bowl between courses.
— Erica Bauermeister, The Lost Art of Mixing
On harsh, frigid January days, when the winds are relentless and the snow piles up around us, I often think of our small feathered friends back on the Third Line. I wonder if the old feeder is still standing in the orchard and if anyone thinks to put out a few crumbs and some bacon drippings for our beautiful, hungry, winter birds. In the stark, white landscape they provided a welcome splash of colour and their songs gave us hope through the long, silent winter.
— Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Calendar
Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts already had set the marks of their galloping consumption on the cheek of the forest, giving warning of the time when the white plague of the winter would make a massacre of all this present glory and turn the trees to naked skeletons and stretch a bony bare cadaver on every steeper hillside to bleach there until the snows covered things up. But now the kindly nighttime had all signs and threats of approaching death, so that each shriveled speckled leaf, as revealed and traced in the waning light, seemed flawless — a perfect part of a perfect tapestry.
— Irvin S. Cobb, On an Island that Cost Twenty-Four Dollars
...I hear the sounds of melting snow outside my window every night and with the first faint scent of spring, I remember life exists...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.
— George Eliot
Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter.("The Wendigo")
— Algernon Blackwood, Monster Mix
Maybe eventually winter will finish our job for us and end the world in ice instead of blood.
— Isaac Marion, Boarded Window
The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon.
— James Carlos Blake, Wildwood Boys
In January in Northern Russia, everything vanishes beneath a deep blanket of whiteness. Rivers, fields, trees, roads, and houses disappear, and the landscape becomes a white sea of mounds and hollows. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard to see where earth merges with air. On brilliant days when the sky is a rich blue, the sunlight is blinding, as if millions of diamonds were scattered on the snow, refracting light. In Catherine's time, the log roads of summer were covered with a smooth coating of snow and ice that enabled the sledges to glide smoothly at startling speeds; on some days, her procession covered a hundred miles.
— Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
Spiders evidently as surprised by the weather as the rest of us: their webs were still everywhere - little silken laundry lines with perfect snowflakes hung out in rows to dry.
— Leslie Land, The 3000-Mile Garden: An Exchange of Letters on Gardening, Food, and the Good Life
And that was the thing: you couldn't just stand there gawking at the world. A car slipped by. Then another. It was as if she'd stood frozen by the river of the world and gratefully stepped back into it, resuming her place... The world waited, cold, grim, alive, beautiful. There was no saying no to it.
— Liz Rosenberg, Home Repair
It was one of those years when there was no summer. There was no winter either. It was just November all year that year.
— Betty K. Erwin, Go to the Room of the Eyes
In winter this town is freezing. You step out your door in the morning and the whole place looks like one of those nature specials in which a guy brings a camcorder to the North Pole and then the camera cuts out and you hear on the news that he got eaten by a bear
— Flynn Meaney, The Boy Recession
There are winter evenings in Massachusetts when there is no wind and the crust on the snow seems to hold in the cold. And if the moon is three-quarters full, its light adds a kind of warmth to the surrounding earth.
— Kathleen Kent, The Heretic's Daughter
NEW HAIKUOne breathy vowelmists the glass warming windowpanes crystalled with snowRobin Glasser
— Robin  Glasser
Winter is much like unrequited love
—  cold and merciless.
It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs.
— Roman Payne
December is an old friend; it reminds you of the past, together you share some laughs and tears, you feel warm-hearted though it’s freezing outside. But, the goodbye is inevitable. May the memories we share with this friend next year be filled with comfort, peace and Love.
— Mohamed Atef
But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.
— Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
The first snow is like the first love. Do you remember your first snow?
— Lara Biyuts
And the cobwebs of timewould surrender,dormant, so that the rainbowsof new eras can emergeDespite the hollownessof you.
— Nema Al-Araby, Remnants and Ashes
I knew by the signs it would be a hard winter. The hollies bore a heavy crop of berries and birds stripped them bare. Crows quarreled in reaped fields and owls cried in the mountains, mournful as widows. Fur and moss grew thicker than usual. Cold rains came, driven sideways through the trees by north winds, and snows followed.
— Sarah Micklem, Firethorn
You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time.
— Dan O'Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch
In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June-- Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers--they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night.
— Jack Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy
He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood.
— Jack Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy
Our favourite amusement during that winter was tobogganing. In places the shore of the lake rises abruptly from the water's edge. Down these steep slopes we used to coast. We would get on our toboggan, a boy would give us a shove, and off we went! Plunging through drifts, leaping hollows, swooping down upon the lake, we would shoot across its gleaming surface to the opposite bank. What joy! What exhilarating madness! For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine!
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Winter was nothing but a season of snow; spring, allergies; and summer...It was the worst. That was swimsuit season.
— Teresa Lo, Realities: a Collection of Short Stories
Along with rising and falling water, winter is the province of wind. When the sea-breath and mountain-roar bend the hemlocks of these hills, the birds hang on as best they can.
— Robert Michael Pyle, Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
And you say Paris is gay, but it has its down times. You say go in the spring and not the summer, because watching the autumn creep through the Rive Gauche preparing for winter is hard.
— Darnell Lamont Walker, Book of She
There it was again, the prickling sense of standing on a precipice.
— Lauren Myracle (Let It Snow)