Laura Dean Bennett
Staff Writer
I invite you to pour yourself a warming cup of tea, coffee, cocoa or cider and curl up in your favorite chair.
As the cold mantle of winter wraps around us, it’s time to enjoy a little winter philosophy with some famous authors.
“In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”
~ William Blake
“I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently. And then it covers them up snug with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”
~ Lewis Carroll
“It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.”
~ John Burroughs
“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
~ Edith Sitwell
“Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.”
~ Mary Oliver
“Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.”
~ Sinclair Lewis
“Nature has many scenes to exhibit and constantly draws a curtain over this part or that. She is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment. Lately we had a leafy wilderness; now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow. Some green she thinks so good for our eyes that, like blue, she never banishes it entirely from our eyes but has created evergreens.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year.”
~ Thomas Wentworth
Higginson
“Kindness is like snow – it beautifies everything it covers.”
~ Kahlil Gibran
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.”
~ Andrew Wyeth
“I write probably 80 percent of my stuff over the winter.”
~ Bob Seger
“…Brew me a cup for a winter’s night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I’ll toast our bright eyes,
my sweetheart fair.”
~ Minna Thomas Antrim
“You can’t get too much winter in the winter.”
~ Robert Frost
“I pray this winter be gentle and kind – a season of rest from the wheel of the mind.”
~ John Geddes
“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”
~ Anne Bradstreet
“Friendship that flows from the heart
cannot be frozen by adversity,
as the water that flows from the spring
cannot congeal in winter.”
~ James Fenimore Cooper
“Winter is the king of showmen,
Turning tree stumps into snowmen
And houses into birthday cakes
And spreading sugar over lakes.
Smooth and clean and frosty white,
The world looks good enough to bite.
That’s the season to be young,
Catching snowflakes on your tongue.
Snow is snowy when it’s snowing,
I’m sorry it’s slushy when it’s going.”
~ Ogden Nash
“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
“I was just thinking, if it is really religion with these nudist colonies, they sure must turn atheists in the wintertime.”
~ Will Rogers
“Withstanding the cold develops vigor for the relaxing days of spring and summer. Besides, in this matter as in many others, it is evident that nature abhors a quitter.”
~ Arthur C. Crandall
Food for thought, isn’t it?
Yeah, we should probably eat.
After all, it is winter. We do have to keep up our strength.