John Treadwell Nichols:
(23 juli 1940 – 27 november 2023).
Een Amerikaanse romanschrijver. Hij schreef de “New Mexico Trilogy – The Milagro Beanfield War” (1974), “The Magic Journey” (1978) en “The Nirvana Blues” (1981) – evenals talrijke andere fictie- en non-fictiewerken.
October is a hallelujah! Reverberating in my body year-round.
“Hallelujah” is a Hebrew word meaning “praise God (“Jahweh”, or “Jehovah”),” used as a cry of joy and gratitude. Calling October “a hallelujah” means the month is felt as a burst of exultation, most likely because of autumn’s colour, light, harvest and crisp air.
The second half, “reverberating in my body year-round,” says the feeling doesn’t stay in October. It echoes in the body, like sound in a resonant space, through the other eleven months. The season is carried inside the speaker, physically and lastingly, rather than remembered only as a nice month. Overall, the line says one month’s beauty leaves a lasting resonance in you.
Origin:
I couldn’t trace the original source. Many October-quote pages repeat the line, including Quoteambition, Silk + Sonder, Positivity Blog and Wise Sayings. None of them name a book, essay or year, and they mostly copy one another. Versions differ slightly (“year-round…” versus “year-round.”), and the Quote Garden shows a shorter form, “October is a hallelujah!”, which suggests repeated copying rather than a checked source.
Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” has a similar-sounding “April hallelujah,” but that is a different month and different wording. It may resemble your line, but I found nothing to say it is connected.
Author:
Nearly every page credits John Nichols, so your guess matches the common attribution. It is still secondhand, and ‘I can’t confirm he wrote it or which work it comes from’. The most likely candidate is the American novelist John Nichols (born 1940), author of “The Milagro Beanfield War”, who wrote about the landscape and seasons of northern New Mexico. That is my inference, since the quote sites don’t say.
