Quote of the Day (William Faulkner, on August in Mississippi)

“In August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.”—American Nobel Literature laureate William Faulkner (1897-1962), Light in August (1932)

Quote of the Day (Truman Capote, on August in Italy, When ‘Everything Became Too Social’)

“In August everything became too social – and I do mean social – the Windsors (morons), the Luces (morons plus), Garbo (looking like death with a suntan), the Oliviers (they let her out), Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors [sic] say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht.” —American fiction writer, essayist and screenwriter Truman Capote (1924-1984), Sept. 12, 1953 letter from Portofino, Italy to friend Andrew Lyndon, in Too Brief A Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke (2004)

Quote of the Day (Truman Capote, on an Idyllic August Cruise in the Aegean)

“August is a month when the meltemi, a raucous wind filled with bits of sand dislodged from distant deserts, blows. It roars so roughly that occasionally we had to take shelter in protected caves. But for the better part the days were calm and passed in an azure haze of crystal water and spaghetti and fresh-caught fish and cold wine and delicious dreamless afternoon siestas. Often we stopped to swim in the far out-to-sea depths; sometimes, when we spotted isolated beaches clean as the inside of seashells, we travelled to them by speed boat and picnicked there.”—American fiction writer, essayist, librettist and screenwriter Truman Capote (1924-1984), “Yachts and Things,” Vanity Fair, December 2012, reprinted in The Complete Stories (2013)

Quote of the Day (Leslie Linsley, on August ‘Holiday Panic’)

“Right after Thanksgiving I go into a holiday panic. Actually it manifests itself twice a year. Once in August when, in a fleeting desire to be superorganized, I decide to buy all my Christmas presents early. This mood vanishes when the sun comes out and the beach beckons, only to return to plague me at the proper time.”— Leslie Linsley, Custom Made (1979)