The day after the first frost, when the old country store fired its pot-bellied stove, usually marked the beginning of winter. That was the time of the year when screen doors were taken down and stacked away in a back room, chairs were taken in from the porch to be placed around the stove, and a new barrel of crackers appeared withing arm's reach. Eric Sloane
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape -- the loneliness of it -- the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it -- the whole story doesn't show. Andrew Wyeth
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. Willa Cather, My Antonia
Winter creeps in, silent as the stars; only when it is full upon us will it howl around the house corner and rattle its icy knuckles at the door and windows. Hal Borland
In winter, when the fields are white,
I sing this song for your delight— Lewis Carroll
Frost is the fringe of winter, a borderline creation that forms on leaf margins at the edge of dawn. Frost is a special season bonus for those who rise with the dawn....a thick white stubble, a hoary night beard. David Cavagnaro
How ironic that trees get naked in winter and we pile on extra clothes. Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight
Search the first winter snow storm for a symphonic arrangement: it is always there. Carl Sandburg
The January wind has a hundred voices. It can scream, it can bellow, it can whisper, it can sing a lullaby. It can roar through the leafless maples and shout down the mountainside and it can murmur through the white pines below the ledges where the lichens make strange hieroglyphics. It can whistle down a chimney and set a hearth fire dancing. In the cold of the lonely night it can rattle the sash and stay there muttering of ice and snow banks and deep-frozen ponds. Hal Borland
[Winter] was a time for storing up, for replenishing reserves. Except for the howling blizzards and the sleetstorm, it was a quiet business. David Cavagnaro
There are two different seasons in the winter when the ice of the river and meadows and ponds is bare — blue or green, a vast glittering crystal — and when it is all covered with snow and slosh; and our moods correspond. The former may be called crystalline winter. Henry David Thoreau
We sometimes wonder why the City Government tilts so vigorously at the snow. The first flake has hardly fluttered down when every infernal machine in town is rushing to do battle. Is snow such poisonous stuff? E.B. White
In the bleak midwinter
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 midwinter,
Long ago. Christina Georgina Rosetti, A Christmas Carol
The winter fist began to unclench a little. John Hay
In the icicled dreamtime of December in upstate New York, the fields deepen in opalescent snow, horses wear platform shoes created by snow strata sticking to their hooves, and ice storms turn barbed wire fences into a string of stars. Diane Ackerman
...winter weather is often cold enough to make a polar bear purr. Eric Pinder
There are winter mornings when the cold without only adds to the cold within, and the more it snows and the more it blows, brighter the fires blaze.
Emily Dickinson
We are on a winter schedule, which means that we are in a five-day weather cycle. The summer cycle is a seven-day rhythm. Hal Borland
To make a perfect winter day like this, you must have a clear, sparkling air, with a sheen from the snow, sufficient cold, little or no wind; and the warmth must come directly from the sun. It must not be a thawing warmth. The tension of nature must not be relaxed. Henry David Thoreau
I had been huddled beside the fire one winter night, with the wind prowling outside and shaking the windows. Loren Eiseley
The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Through the weeks of deep snow we walked above the ground on fallen sky... Wendell Berry
There's one good thing about snow, it makes your lawn look as nice as your neighbor's. Clyde Moore
I've come to learn its winter driving I hate. Give me a snowscape on foot, and a wonderland emerges before my eyes. Keith C. Heidorn, The Weather Doctor
Winter is a hammer swung by a strong, invisible hand. it splits boulders into rubble, chops mountainsides into neatly packaged loads of pebbles and clay that are light enough for rivers and rainwater to carry to the sea. Eric Pinder
In the deepest darkest heart of winter when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end and the witch measles that meteorologists call drizzle are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk...I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus... Tom Robbins
The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty. It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky haze, making everything quieter as it fell, so that winter seemed to partake of religion in a way no other season did, hushed, solemn. Patricia Hampl
And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country
know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms . . .and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
Often our winter snowfalls are preceded by a windless waiting time, a sense of listening, of expectations everywhere. At other times, the storm pounces, arrives with a rush and the fall of snow is heavy from the beginning. Edwin Way Teale
Oh winter! One never, never loses the surprise and wonder of new fallen snow, that inexplainable something that touches the core of your innermost being as you stand in your nightie shivering and amazed at the pure glory of the transformation. Emily Carr
Cold is our element and winter's air
Brings voices as of lions coming down. Wallace Stevens The Sun This March.
Of the four seasons, spring entices, summer makes you welcome, autumn gives you a lingering farewell, but winter remains aloof. We think of it as harsh and uncomprimising. We speak of the dead months, the night of the year, the return of the ice age, the winter of our discontent. Yet, paradoxically, in its own way, winter is a time of superlative life. Frosty air sets our blood to racing. The nip of the wind quickens our step. Edwin Way Teale
Oh, what a blamed uncertain thing
This pesky weather is!
It blew and snew and then it thew,
And now, by jing, it's friz! Philander Johnson
The winter storms of snow and cold are ruled by a person sometimes called the Coldmaker. He is white, not as the white man is white, but rather like the snow, and is clad in white and rides a white horse. He brings the storm, riding in the midst of it and some people have the power to call him and bring on a snowstorm. George Bird Grinnell
No summer is long enough to take away the winter. The winter always comes. Barry Lopez
We live in a country that experiences real winter every year. Why are we always surprised, and upset about it? Get yourself some warm clothing, and enjoy the season! Skate outdoors, go tobogganing, go skiing! There is no use being miserable for a quarter of your life! Ed Robertson, Canadian Musician with Barenaked Ladies
Gray fighting winter winds, come along on the tearing blizzard tails, the snouts of the hungry hunting storms, come fighting gray in winter. Carl Sandburg
The winter with its snow and ice, is not an evil to be corrected. It is as it was designed and made to be, for the artists has had leisure to add beauty to use. Henry David Thoreau
The summer chair
rocking by itself
In the blizzard Jack Kerouac
Every winter when I see what snow and ice can do to life in the cities I think how improvidently we have organized urban existence. Hal Borland
Old Tyme Winter: The images that that phrase evokes are almost invariably nostalgic -- appealing, even comforting, and, yes, warm. What a word to apply to the memory of a climate so frigid it could feeze the eyelids together! Pierre Berton
Whenever some old-timer tries to tell you that the old fashioned winter was worst than the example we've just had, put him down as an imaginative chap. John Williams
Great winter itself looked like a precious gem, reflecting rainbow colors from one angle. Henry David Thoreau
The whine of cold snow underfoot is winter music, like nothing else in the world. Hal Borland
The sky has for me become one of possibilities, just as have winter, ice and snow; which I no longer regard as burdens, prisons, or tortures, but rather as a new form of freedom. Pierre Trottier
Winter tends to be a season which dwellers of cold regions try vehemently to deny. Norman Pressman
The first flakes of snow drifting lazily down from a sullen sky, herald the onset of winter. How innocent they look -- as soft, as gentle, as fluffy as a child's stuffed animal. Pierre Berton
Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. Albert Camus
It is a pleasure to the real lover of Nature to give winter all the glory he can, for summer will make its own way and speak its own praises. Dorothy Wordsworth
With winter will come a new earth and seasonal smell, fierce and keen and very real — the smell of snow Henry Beston, Northern Farm
Winter...has its own suspense and violence, its roars and silences...an inwardness and resistance... John Hay
There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter.
One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues. Hal Borland
When one has faith that the spring thaw will arrive, the winter winds seem to lose some of their punch. Robert L. Veninga
Winter is the one season that seems interminable. Although we greet the first feathery fall of snow with pleasure, we are fed up with it by February. "Will it never end?" we ask, knowing that the bitter winds of March still lie ahead. Pierre Berton
Learn More From These Relevant Books Chosen by The Weather Doctor
Mergen, Bernard.: Snow in America, 1997, Smithsonian Institute Press; ISBN: 1-56098-381-7.
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