blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

Winter is one of the best times of year to curl up with a good book. The nights are longer, darker, and colder, and many of us spent the winter months inside trying to keep warm and turning to indoor forms of entertainment. There's just something comforting about a winter evening spent under a blanket while it's snowing outside. The following books all have something to say about the quieter, colder part of the year. If you're like me and want to spend the winter reading, let this list of some of the best literary quotes about winter serve as a potential reading list as you decide which books you'll cozy up to this year:

I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again. ―Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins. ― Gustave Flaubert, November

Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without. ― Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that. ― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Although it was only six o'clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter's rough poetry. ― Théophile Gautier, Hashish, Wine, Opium

That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. ― Ali Smith, Winter

When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night, the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night. ― Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt, exhausted, and stayed. ― Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

It's so hard to think in winter. The world seems confined in the space of your heart; you can't see beyond yourself. ― Patricia A. McKillip, Winter Rose