There is a great deal of difference between what is first in time and what is first in importance.

"It's spring," Mike said. "Oh, yes, of course, jolly old spring!" said Gissing, as though this was something he had known all along, and had just forgotten for the moment. But he didn't know. This was his first spring, for he was only ten months old.

People tend to feel happy when spring arrives, especially after a cold winter.
When spring begins, however, cannot be pinpointed to one particular moment. There is no one day that clearly marks when winter ends and spring begins. Spring hides inside winter. We notice it emerging with our eyes, our skin, and other senses. We find it in new buds, a comfortable breeze and the warmth of the sun. It exists alongside winter.

Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.

Now Spring returns; but not to me returns.

Spring is the time of the year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You´re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, A wind comes off a frozen peak, And you´re two months back in the middle of March.

After December all weather that is not wintry is springlike. Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulf-stream of winter, nearer the shores of spring.

It is not merely that the rain falls differently on each of you, for that can be a wonder and a joy: it is that what is rain for the one is not rain for the other.

The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.

There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.

Autumn to winter — winter into spring — Spring into summer — summer into fall — Thus rolls the changing year, and thus we change; Motion so swift we know not that we move.

There's a big difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

No, not of course at all — it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke — that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead’ but ‘merry-go-round’!