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For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.

Hal Borland

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Hal Borland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1900
Born: May 14
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Writer
Lives
Purple
Autumn
Area
Perennial
Temptation
Maple
Areas
Adjectives
Sea
Oaks
England
Plunge
Anyone
October

More quotes by Hal Borland

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No winter lasts forever no spring skips its turn.
Hal Borland
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Here and there one sees the blush of wild rose haws or the warmth of orange fruit on the bittersweet, and back in the woods is the occasional twinkle of partridgeberries. But they are the gem stones, the rare decorations which make the grays, the browns and the greens seem even more quiet, more completely at rest.
Hal Borland
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He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.
Hal Borland
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October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.
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Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.
Hal Borland
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Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?
Hal Borland
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March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.
Hal Borland
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A frontier is never a place it is a time and a way of life.
Hal Borland
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Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.
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The earth's distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him, too.
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In a painful time of my life I went often to a wooded hillside where May apples grew by the hundreds, and I thought the sourness of their fruit had a symbolism for me. Instead, I was to find both love and happiness soon thereafter. So to me [the May apple] is the mandrake, the love symbol, of the old dealers in plant restoratives.
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Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
Hal Borland
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For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.
Hal Borland
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Catch a vista of maples in that long light and you see Autumn glowing through the leaves.... The promise of gold and crimson is there among the branches, though as yet it is achieved on only a stray branch, an impatient limb or an occasional small tree which has not yet learned to time its changes.
Hal Borland
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Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.
Hal Borland
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You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.
Hal Borland
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No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.
Hal Borland
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For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.
Hal Borland
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Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all.
Hal Borland
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There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as wells as bowers and grassy banks.
Hal Borland