I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward. – Anne Lamott

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be. – Margaret Atwood

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile. – George Bernard Shaw

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. – Albert Camus
Autumn … the year’s last, loveliest smile. ― William Cullen Bryant
I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it. ― Lee Maynard
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer. — Wallace Stegner

I’ve always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I’ve never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it. – John Steinbeck

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. — Abraham Lincoln

Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. — Ronald Reagan

It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal – otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again… — Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language. – Carol Shields

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop. – Alfred Hitchcock

A room without books is like a body without a soul. — Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC-43 BC)

No furniture is so charming as books. – Rev. Sydney Smith (1771-1845)

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. —
Toni Morrison (1931-present)

In summer, the song sings itself. — William Carlos Williams

Then followed that beautiful season… Summer….
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is   jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world. — Ada Louise Huxtable