In Celebration of Spring: Songs, Quotes & Photos

Spring never ceases to feel like a miracle to me. New England’s unrelenting winters always leave me feeling doubtful that warm weather will find its way back to us again. As the trees finally begin to bud and the flowers push through the earth’s surface, it brings an undeniable hope that feels like falling in love for the first time.

This post is in honor of spring’s ability to breathe new life into everything that it touches. I’ve curated a selection of spring photos (mine) and spring quotes (not mine) that truly capture the season’s beauty. Let me know which spring quotes, photos & songs are your favorites! Happy spring!

Vladimir Nabokov:

“Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.”

Marty Rubin:

“The deep roots never doubt spring will come.”

—

Yukio Mishima:

“There were only the cherry trees blossoming undisturbed among the evergreens, making one feel as though he were seeing the naked bodies of the blossoms. Nature’s free bounty and useless extravagance had never appeared so fantastically beautiful as it did this spring. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that Nature had come to reconquer the earth for herself.”

Xiao Hong:

“Spring passes quickly. If you haven’t been out for five days, you find the trees in bud. If you don’t see the trees for another five days, you discover that they’ve put out leaves. In another five days, they’re so green you wouldn’t recognize them. It makes you wonder: Can these be the same trees I saw a few days before? And you answer yourself: Of course they are. That’s how fast spring goes by. You can almost see it. From far away it comes racing toward you. And when it reaches you it whispers in your ear, ‘I’m here,’ and then runs swiftly on. Spring—what a rush it’s in. Every place seems to be urging it to come.”

—

Charlotte Eriksson:

“I am the way a life unfolds and blooms and seasons come and go, and I am the way the spring always finds a way to turn even the coldest winter into a field of green and flowers and new life.”

John Burroughs:

“To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring—these are some of the rewards of the simple life.”

—

Rainer Maria Rilke:

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

Willa Cather:

“After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There was only spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then laid down to be petted.”

—

Matthew Arnold:

 “It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.”

Amy Leach:

“A tree can be tempted out of its winter dormancy by a few hours of southerly sun. The readiness to believe in spring is stronger than sleep or sanity.”

—

John Galsworthy:

“It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.”

Akshay Vasu:

“You have the touch of nature, you know, where she touches everything that is dead and they spring back into life again. I realized that the day you touched me for the first time. I felt I was standing somewhere I had never been before, and all of a sudden life started pouring over me like a rain and drenching me with it. I had never felt that alive before.”

—

Pablo Neruda:

“I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

L.M. Montgomery:

“It was in the spring that she and I had first loved each other, or, at least, had first come into the full knowledge that we loved. I think that we must have loved each other all our lives, and that each succeeding spring was a word in the revelation of that love, not to be understood until, in the fullness of time, the whole sentence was written out in that most beautiful of all beautiful springs.”

—

Terri Guillemets:

“Spring: the music of open windows.”

Craig D. Lounsbrough:

“If life is nothing more than a journey to death, autumn makes sense, but spring does not.”

—

Richelle E. Goodrich:

“The first real day of spring is like the first time a boy holds your hand. A flood of skin-tingling warmth consumes you, and everything shines with a fresh, colorful glow, making you forget that anything as cold and harsh as winter ever existed.”

Mark Doty:

“This greening does thaw at the edges of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that’s as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy for so long. At first I felt odd—as if I shouldn’t be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It’s my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive: happy, suddenly with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in.”

Gene Stratton-Porter:

“Every intoxicating delight of early spring was in the air. The breeze that fanned her cheek was laden with subtle perfume and the crisp, fresh odor of unfolding leaves.”

—

Der Nister:

“It was one of those days that made one want to open doors and gates to release the last traces of winter, to watch them disappear like thin wisps of smoke into the farthest reaches of the sky.”

Pamela Todd:

“There were days so clear and skies so brilliant blue, with white clouds scudding across them like ships under full sail, and she felt she could lift right off the ground. One moment she was ambling down a path, and the next thing she knew, the wind would take hold of her, like a hand pushing against her back. Her feet would start running without her even willing it, even knowing it. And she would run faster and faster across the prairie, until her heart jumped like a rabbit and her breath came in deep gasps and her feet barely skimmed the ground. It felt good to spend herself this way. The air tasted fresh and delicious; it smelled like damp earth, grass, and flowers. And her body felt strong, supple, and hungry for more of everything life could serve up. She ran and felt like one of the animals, as though her feet were growing up out of the earth. And she knew what they knew, that sometimes you ran just because you could, because of the way the rush of air felt on your face and how your legs reached out, eating up longer and longer patches of ground. She ran because there were ghosts chasing her, shadows that pursued her, heartaches she was leaving behind. She was running for her life, and those phantoms couldn’t catch her, not here, not anywhere. She would outrun fear and sadness and worry and shame and all those losses that had lined up against her like a column of soldiers with their guns shouldered and ready to fire. If she had to, she would outrun death itself. She would keep on running until she dropped, exhausted. Then she would roll over onto her back and breathe in the endless sky above her, sun glinting off her face. To be an animal, to have a body like this that could taste, see, hear, and fly through space, to lie down and smell the earth and feel the heat of the sun on your face was enough for her. She did not need anything else but this: just to be alive, cool air caressing her skin, dreaming of ivy and what might be ahead.”

Unica Zürn:

“There cannot ever have been a spring more beautiful than this. I did not know until now that clouds could be like this. I did not know that the sky is the sea and that clouds are the souls of happy ships, sunk long ago. I did not know that the wind could be tender, like hands as they caress—what did I know—until now?”

—

Ellis Peters:

“Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.”

Neltje Blanchan:

“Can words describe the fragrance of the very breath of spring?”

—

Which spring quotes, photos & songs best capture spring’s beauty, in your opinion? What are your favorite ways to celebrate the season? What are you most looking forward to now that the weather’s warming up? Let me know in the comments!

P.S. For more gorgeous spring photos, check out my spring-inspired Pinterest board below!

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