“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.” I saw this Pablo Neruda quote scrawled onto a sandwich board in Brooklyn this weekend, just as I was coming out of a weeks-long funk. The sun was shining and daffodils were popping out of the ground, and I was sure I couldn’t have come across it at a more perfect time. What a relief it is that we’ve survived the cold months! At times, this year’s tedious winter seemed endless — which is why Neruda’s words have stuck with me these last few days. If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that spring will always find its way back, no matter how dismal January feels. Here are some quotes to keep you smiling and rejuvenated through this season of new beginnings…
“I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees.” — Pablo Neruda
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” — Margaret Atwood
“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” – Anne Bradstreet
“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” – Mark Twain
“The time came when the risk it took to remain tight in the bud became more painful than the risk it took to bloom.” – Anais Nin
“If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.” – Nadine Stair
“Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.” – Doug Larson
“I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.” – Anne Lamott
“Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men.” – Chinese Proverb
“Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.” – Robert H. Schuller
“An optimist is the human personification of spring.” — Susan J. Bissonette
“As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.” –– Alice Walker
“To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” – George Santayana
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” — Anne Lamott
“Despite the forecast, live like it’s spring.” – Lilly Pulitzer
Original by Claire Hannum