10 Writers on the Beauty of Spring

No, your eyes don’t deceive you — that’s actually sunshine outside. Though one would assume that the dark and dreary months of winter would serve as ideal inspiration for typically tortured, it seems that even the moodiest of the great writers (ahem. looking at you, Virginia) couldn’t deny the many charms of spring. As warmer weather looks like it just might be here to stay — fingers and toes crossed, knocking on wood all over the place — we’re finally shaking off the winter dust with a few famous quotes to put the spring back in our in our step.

"I wish to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees"

—Pablo Neruda, "Poem XIV"

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”

—Anne Bradstreet, "Meditations Divine and Moral"

“It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want — oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”

—Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Detective

“A little madness in the Spring is wholesome even for the King.”

—Emily Dickinson, "A Little Madness in the Spring"

"You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming — in fact not at all a warming — yet suddenly Summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise."

—Joan Didion, Blue Nights

"It was a lover and his lass, With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, That o'er the green corn-field did pass, In the spring time, the only pretty ring time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet lovers love the spring."

—William Shakespeare, "The Winter’s Tale"

“I enjoy the Spring more than the Autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.”

—Virigina Woolf, Jacob's Room

“In Spring at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt”

—Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

“Spring is when life’s alive in everything”

— Christina Rosetti, "Spring"

“Spring when the world is mud-luscious…when the world is puddle-wonderful”

—e.e. cummings, "in Just"