Afternoons are hard. Mornings are pure evil from the pits of hell, which is why I don't do them anymore.

— Rachel Caine

All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.

— Markus Zusak

By three in the afternoon, after one Bin tang too many, I was absolutely smashed and feared that trying to stand may end badly.

— S.A. Tawks

Fall in love with the energy of the mornings trace your fingers along the lull of the afternoon stake the spirit of the evening sin your arms kiss it deeply and then make Loreto the tranquility of the nights.

— Sanober Khan

Happiness is a hot bath on a Sunday afternoon.

— A.D. Posey

Her legs swing complete afternoons away.

— Jill Eisenstadt

I am clumsy, drop glasses and get drunk on Monday afternoons. I read Seneca and can recite Shakespeare by heart, but I mess up the laundry, don’t answer my phone and blame the world when something goes wrong. Furthermore, I think I have a dream, but most of the days I’m still sleeping. The grass is cut. It smells like strawberries. Today I finished four books and cleaned my drawers. Do you believe in a God? Can I tell you about Icarus? How he flew too close to the sun? I want to make coming home your favorite part of the day. I want to leave tiny little words lingering in your mind, on nights when you’re far away and can’t sleep. Furthermore, I want to make everything around us beautiful; make small things mean a little more. Make you feel a little more. A little better, a little lighter. The coffee is warm, this cup is yours. I want to be someone you can’t live without. I want to be someone you can’t live without.

— Charlotte Eriksson

If you come at four in the afternoon, I'll begin to be happy by three.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It was normal for it to rain, but in October-who could forget the rains of October?- now this disturbingly silent rain was falling. That was so nebulous that it was pretty; that, if it had not been wet, no one would have believed it was raining; that was so slow that it was possible to follow its fall with one's eyes. That which villagers called 'the rains of October' was the accumulation of the serenity of such a life. Eyes almost broke into tears on looking at the sun subdividing itself, at the end of the afternoon, in each drop of that snail's-pace precipitation, as if the great star had dissolved each day an infinitesimal bit more.

— Ondjaki

Kansas afternoons in late summer are peculiar and wondrous things. Often they are pregnant, if not over-ripe, with a pensive and latent energy that is utterly incapable of ever finding an adequate release for itself. This results in a palpable, almost frenetic tension that hangs in the air just below the clouds. By dusk, spread thin across the quilt-work farmlands by disparate prairie winds, this formless energy creates an abscess in the fabric of space and time that most individuals rarely take notice of. But in the sourish chambers of particularly sensitive observers, it elicits a familiar recognition—a vague remembrance—of something both dark and beautiful. Some understand it simply as an undefined tranquility tinged with despair over the loss of something now forgotten. For others, it signifies something far more sinister, and is therefore something to be feared.

— P.S. Baber