“October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. The names of the subjects all seem to lay open the way to a new world. Your arms are full of new, clean notebooks, waiting to be filled. You pass the doors of the library, and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure.”

― Thomas Merton

““October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!”

― Rainbow Rowell 

“October is the treasure of the year,

And all the months pay bounty to her store…” Paul Laurence Dunbar,

“In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October, when the trees are bare to the mild heavens, and the red leaves bestrew the road, and you can feel the breath of winter, morning and evening—no days so calm, so tenderly solemn, and with such a reverent meekness in the air.” Alexander Smith

“October is a fallen leaf, but it is also the wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hill once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above that hill once again.”  Hal Borlan

“In October a maple-tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days its presence helps to dispel the gloom.” John Burroughs

“October is the month of painted leaves.

Their rich glow now flashes round the world.

As fruits and leaves and the day itself

acquire a bright tint just before they fall,

so the year near its setting.

October is its sunset sky;

November the later twilight.” Henry David Thoreau,