No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

Hal Borland was best known for reflective nature writing that uses seasonal change as a moral and emotional metaphor. This line is widely circulated as one of his aphoristic observations about endurance and renewal, drawing on the New England landscape that often frames his essays and columns. It is typically quoted in contexts of hardship—personal loss, illness, economic difficulty, or social turmoil—where the “winter” stands for a period of suffering and the “spring” for the return of hope. However, the precise occasion on which Borland first published or spoke this sentence is not reliably pinned down in commonly available reference sources.

Borland uses the cycle of seasons as a metaphor for human experience. “Winter” stands for periods of deprivation, grief, stagnation, or fear; the assurance that it “lasts” neither permanently nor absolutely offers consolation without denying difficulty. The second clause—“no spring skips its turn”—adds a note of moral and temporal order: renewal is not merely possible but built into the structure of time, though it arrives on its own schedule rather than ours. The aphorism therefore encourages patience and resilience, suggesting that perseverance through bleak intervals is rational because change is inevitable and recovery recurrent.