The Summer Solstice officially marks the beginning of summer on June 20, 2020. It is the longest day of the year as the north pole is at its greatest tilt towards the sun. On this day, the sun travels its longest path through the sky in the Northern Hemisphere, making it the day with the most sunlight. Beaches opening, flowers blooming, and grasshoppers chirping are all comforting signs that summer has arrived.
Although this year is much different with COVID-19 weighing heavy on many us, here are some of the best summertime quotes to elevate your mood. Whether you’re in need of a trip down memory lane of what summer once was or in search of the perfect quotes for Instagram captions, you’ll appreciate these catchy lines about the season.
“It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.”
Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy-Tacy and Tib
“Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me.”
Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“Do what we can, summer will have its flies.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
“Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. For those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. You can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. Summer just opens the door and lets you out.”
Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
“Summer romances end for all kinds of reasons. But when all is said and done, they have one thing in common: They are shooting stars-a spectacular moment of light in the heavens, a fleeting glimpse of eternity. And in a flash, they’re gone.”
Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
“I fell for her in summer, my lovely summer girl, from summer she is made, my lovely summer girl, I’d love to spend a winter with my lovely summer girl, but I’m never warm enough for my lovely summer girl, it’s summer when she smiles, I’m laughing like a child, it’s the summer of our lives; we’ll contain it for a while she holds the heat, the breeze of summer in the circle of her hand I’d be happy with this summer if it’s all we ever had.”
Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver
“Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That’s why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.”
Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
” Shall I compare thee to a summers day? Though art more lovely and more temperate: rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer’s lease hath all too short a date;”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
“Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August.“
Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty
“Early June, the world of leaf and blade and flowers explode and every sunset is different.”
John Steinbeck, The Winter Of Our Discontent
“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me, those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language,”
Henry James, In An International Episode
“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
“It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer. Everything fades: the shimmer of gold over White Cove; the laughter in the night air; the lavender early morning light on the faces of skyscrapers, which had suddenly become so heroically tall. Every dawn seemed to promise fresh miracles, among other joys that are in short supply these days.”
Anna Godbersen, Bright Young Things
“One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”
Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
” A good swimming pool could do that – make the rest of the world seem possibly insignificant, as far away as the surface of the moon”
Emma Straub, The Vacationers
