48 Winter Quotes

Winter's here, and you feel lousy: You're coughing and sneezing; your muscles ache; your nose is an active mucus volcano. These symptoms -- so familiar at this time of year -- can mean only one thing: Tiny fanged snails are eating your brain.

I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty-seven-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding.

Two evils, monstrous either one apart, Possessed me, and were long and loath at going: A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart, And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

In the bleak mid-winter 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 mid-winter Long ago.

The snow had begun in the gloaming, And busily all the night Had been heaping field and highway With a silence deep and white.

Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appearrs, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds - the indivisible shared out in endless abundance.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

It was the winter wild While the Heav'n-born child All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies.

Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day.

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.

The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling.

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member- No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds- November!

Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge, Gold that I never see; Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge That will not shower on me.

They stick out a lot and tend to catch the wind. I loved skiing as a teenager but I had to stop because my ears got so cold .

If they [the Germans] attack, we will defend. If they do not attack until winter comes, then we will and will tear them to shreds!

Our tasks are definite. The first to see that no man, woman, or child shall go hungry or unsheltered through the approaching winter. The second is to see that our great benevolent agencies for character building, for hospitalization, for care of children and all their vast number of agencies of voluntary solicitude for the less fortunate are maintained in full strength. The third is to maintain the bedrock principle of our liberties by the full mobilization of individual and local resources and responsibilities. The fourth is that we may maintain the spiritual impulses in our people for generous giving and generous service-in the spirit that each is his brother's keeper.

Les hivers sont pour les femmes a la mode ce que fut jadis une campagne pour les militaires de l'empire.

On a bleak wintry morning some years ago I was summoned to the office of our naval attache at the American embassy in Kabul.

See how I fall like the snow, Come to cover the lovers, (But don't you wake them up) Come to sparkle the dark up, With just a touch of make up. Come to cover the muck up. Ooh with a little luck - December will be magic again.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,- the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.

Christmas is here: Winds whistle shrill, Icy and chill. Little care we; Little we fear Weather without, Sheltered about The Mahogany Tree.

I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam - a flat foreground of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted, because... their cargoes were frozen-in up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond the waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line of brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs. From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children.

All I had to do was to cross the river, capture Brussels, and then go on to take the port of Antwerp. The snow was waist-deep and there wasn't room to deploy four tanks abreast, let alone six armored divisions. It didn't get light until eight and was dark again at four, and my tanks can't fight at night. And all this at Christmas time!

In winter, when the dismal rain Comes down in slanting lines, And Wind, that grand old harper, smote His thunder-harp of pines.

And silence matched the silence under snow.

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be.

But he sent her Good-by, And said to be good, And wear her red hood, And look for skunk tracks In the snow with an ax - And do everything!

My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.

Perhaps when all the world is bare And cruel winter holds the land, The Love that finds no place to hide Will run and catch my hand. I shall not care to have him then, I shall be bitter and a-cold - It grows too late for frolicking When all the world is old. Then little hiding Love, come forth, Come forth before the autumn goes, And let us seek thro' ruined paths The garden's last red rose.

The winter moon becomes a companion, the heart of the priest, sunk in meditation upon religion and philosophy, there in the mountain hall, is engaged in a delicate interplay and exchange with the moon; and it is this of which the poet sings.