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Quotations about Spring Fever
Welcome to my page of quotations about spring fever, in both its meanings — the invigoration and restlessness that we tend to know it as today, as well as some quotes from when it was an actual disease. Lack of fresh vegetables and vitamin C in the winter could lead to scurvy by springtime which caused unpleasant physical symptoms along with fatigue. So whether you're looking for descriptions of the excitement, increase in energy, and lift in mood, or the decreased health, lethargy, and depression, you've come to the right place. May you enjoy — or recover from — your spring fever!
The air was warm and balmy, carrying that subtle current which caused the mild madness of spring fever. ~Zane Grey, The Call of the Canyon, 1921
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, Tom Sawyer, Detective, 1896
The window is open and a warm, delicious little breeze comes wandering in. It smells of magnolias and dogwood and it whispers in our ears enticing little stories of gurgling brooks and cool woods. Yes, we have got spring fever and got it bad. ~Country Life, June 1922
...the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning... ~Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 1968
At this time of year, our weather nerves are right up on the surface. The bad seems worse and the good seems better than reality. We would give anything for a fine Spring-fever week and a little sunburn. ~Hal Borland, "Patience," February 1951
Did any of you fellows ever have the spring fever. If you did can you tell me what it is. Here is my version of it: Have found it to be the most annoying, aggravating, disagreeable, doggondest disease that ever tackled a fellow. Gets into his bones, someway, about this time of the year and makes him want to do nothing with all his might and rest while he is doing it... Terrible disease, this spring fever. Bones ache, head swims, lips dry up and parch, shoes hurt, flannels burn, clothes weigh a ton and you can't go without them like you used to could without being arrested. There isn't anything that will cure it either — only taking a day from your work and going to the creek, and taking off your shoes and wading over the riffle. ~Slivers, "Spring Fever," in Stove Mounters' & Range Workers' Journal, May 1910
The first day o' spring, when the trees is all green
An' birds is a-singin' as gay as you please,
An' all of th' grass looks so new-made an' clean,
An' you can't hear much but th' hum o' th' bees,
W'y, then's when I wish I could shut up my books
An' run out barefooted an' play everywhere —
But teacher she gives me th' sternest o' looks
An' says to stay in — an' I say it ain't fair!
~Wilbur D. Nesbit, "Spring Fever," in Clare A. Briggs, When a Feller Needs a Friend, 1914
About this time of the year spring fever attacks the offending citizen and reduces him to temporary junk. Spring fever is more terrible than other fevers because it cannot be cured by swallowing a clinical thermometer and running out a few yards of tongue in the presence of a doctor. When a man has spring fever he has to suffer along with the knowledge that nothing is the matter with him and there isn't enough sympathy in the wide world to spare him one little tear. Spring fever is so called because it removes the spring from man and leaves him a mass of helpless woe. ~George Fitch, "Spring Fever," Thoughts That Throb, in Collier's Weekly, April 1914
The lazy man always extends a welcome to the spring-fever microbe. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1903, George Horace Lorimer, editor
A robin was singing
In fine warm rain,
And rabbits were bouncing
All over my brain.
"Children," said Teacher,
"I have never
Seen such attacks
Of springtime fever!
"You can't count ten,
And you can't spell,
And you can't parse nouns,
And it's just as well!
"School is dismissed!
And wait for me
So I can come climb that
Wild apple tree!"
~Frances Frost, "Dream on a Spring Night," The Little Whistler, 1949
Late March is a time of waiting, and by now the fabric of human patience has worn a little thin... We want the world to get on with the basic business of spring, without having to keep looking over its shoulder ready to face another interruption from the bedraggled forces of winter. We want to hear robins and orioles singing, not jays and crows jeering. We want to see violets, not snowdrops. So we wait, impatient, and the seasons take their own time... We want to hear spring peepers and see the green haze spreading through the treetops, and we are weary of waiting. And if we seem to be captiously impatient, that is a hopeful sign. Such peevishness is an early but dependable symptom of spring fever. ~Hal Borland, "Waiting," March 1965
April is promises and tentative beginnings, but May is achievement. May is dawn shimmering with dew and sunrise on lawn and meadow, dancing with young leaves in every woodland, jubilant with birdsong in every treetop. May is dogtooth violets beside brimming brooks, the first buttercups beyond the pasture fence, purple violets everywhere. May is apple blossoms and lilacs... May's sunny days still invite spring fever and the heart is still tempted by May's air of young ecstasy. May is full of gaiety and laughter. ~Hal Borland, "May," April 1962
Of all kinds of fever, contagious or non-contagious, only slightly serious or serious to the nth degree, not one is so well known or so much talked of as the one called spring fever. The school boy or girl finds it well nigh impossible to resist the temptation to play hookey. In the case of nearly every woman, it is known as the spring cleaning fever. The first warm days of spring cause it to break out, and the ones affected are governed by an almost uncontrollable desire to get to work at housecleaning. The fever rages so fiercely that no matter how scrupulous she may have been on the subject of cleaning all during the winter months, still she cannot be satisfied until she opens the whole house to the spring air and sunshine. After the cleaning is done the fever cools off and dies out, leaving the world a much more wholesome and livable place. ~“Spring Fever,” St. Mary's Chimes, May 1921 [a little altered
There's an illness that has been documented by poets for centuries. Its symptoms include a flushed face, increased heart rate, appetite loss, restlessness and daydreaming. It's spring fever, that wonderfully amorphous disease we all recognize come April and May. ~Christie Nicholson, "Fact or Fiction?: 'Spring Fever' Is a Real Phenomenon," ScientificAmerican.com, 2007
According to the latest authorities spring fever, the cause of so much loss of energy, can be prevented by homemakers if they will feed their families in the winter season with plenty of green vegetables. ~Richard Gay Neville, M.D., "Spring Fever," The Forecast, 1921
And what is spring fever? Why, when all other animate things are actually springing into new life and expressing themselves with appropriate joy, should man languish and lament the caresses of the climbing sun? Why, when all other life revels in the out-of-doors, should man seek out the poison-laden air and darkened confines of the house of drugs, and carry thence with him a package of "spring medicine"? Spring seems the finest of tonics, and even of stimulants, to other life; why should man need to counteract its influence with nauseous concoctions? ~James Frederick Rogers, M.D., "Spring Fever," in Life & Health, April 1913
The best cure for spring fever is to loaf in the sun or go fishing. It is Nature's divine intimation to halt for a few moments and watch how she Does Things. In one sense, spring fever is a penalty of civilization. To our savage as well as our animal ancestors, spring was a time of awakening from the winter's torpor, a time of throbbing pulse, of eager running hither and thither, of combat and mating and rioting. It was the real New Year, and should be ours instead of that pale, frost-bitten shadow of a shade which the almanacs have deluded us into anæmically celebrating in midwinter.
But now, with Puritan perversity, civilized man celebrates the real glad birth of the New Year in April with spring medicines and spring cleanings and the bankruptcies and heartburnings of Easter bonnets. And when, instead of caroling with the birds and gamboling with the young lambs and reveling in the young green of the grass and the scent of the woodland flowers, we feel depressed and headachy and fur-lined and bilious, we say we have spring fever, and proceed to dose ourselves with a "yarb" tea or a blood medicine. It is a slander upon Nature. ~Woods Hutchinson, A.M., M.D. (1862–1930), "Spring Fever and Spring Cleaning," Civilization and Health, 1914
The lark mounted the sky in circles singing his delirious song. Doves were flying hither and thither as if they had just discovered that they could fly, diving and wheeling and then going away in a great company, coming back and diving again. Joseph felt he would like to have wings and go away with them.
He enjoyed the little puffing winds that came and went, and the insects that came out of their hiding-places to enjoy the morning. The dragonflies were bustling about their business, rustling past on gauzy wings. The bees were coming and going from their hive, incited by the fragrance of the flowers, crawling over the anemones and leaving them hastily to bury their blunt noses in the pistils of the white squills that abounded everywhere in the corners, in the inlets and bays and crevices of the rocks. Butterflies, especially the white, pursued love untiringly in the air, fluttering and hovering, uniting and then separating — aerial wooings. Fig and mulberry leaves showed against the dark rocks, and the scent of the vine-flower was on the breeze. The hillsides were covered with pale yellow clusters.
Joseph ran up the hill. He wished to roll like a young donkey, heels in the air, in the flowering turf. He desired to roll himself, over and over, among the grass and flowers, running hither and thither after insects and birds, his heart aflame with delight on this spring morning. He desired so many things that he did not know what he desired, only that he desired. Old as he was, he was glad to feel that he was still liable to the season's thrill. ~George Moore, The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story, 1916 [modified
A man grows sick of the walls of brick, and the city's endless roar, when old winter goes, with its frosts and snows, and the springtime's at the door. His soul rebels at the city's smells, and he says to himself, says he, "There are banks of thyme with a scent sublime, and the woodland's calling me!" His soul revolts at the jars and jolts that the urban dweller knows, at his sordid task, when he longs to bask in the glen where the cowslip grows; and he says, "Gee whiz! I am tired of biz, and sick of the sights I see, of the stress and strain for a tawdry gain, when the woodland's calling me!" In all human lives, when the spring arrives, there riseth the wanderlust; and a fellow's dreams are of woods and streams, and the long road white with dust. And he heaves a sob as he views his job, from which he won't dare to flee; and he says, "By Hoyle! It is hard to toil, when the woodland's calling me!" ~Walt Mason (1862–1939), "Spring Thoughts"
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published 2006 Feb 3
revised 2016, 2019
last saved 2024 May 26
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