Night Quotes

By night, I am free. No one hears my monsters but me. My freedom is fragile, though, Because every morning, Over and over, The night is broken by the sun. It’s a good way to die.

~ Courtney Cole

Although it was only six o'clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter's rough poetry.

~ Théophile Gautier

Isn't it queer that the things we writhe over at night are seldom wicked things? Just humiliating ones.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes.

~ Charles Dickens

O night, O sweetest time, though black of hue,with peace you force all the restless work to end;those who exalt you see and understand,and he is sound of mind who honours you.You cut the thread of tired thoughts, for soyou offer calm in your moist shade; you sendto this low sphere the dreams where we ascendup to the highest, where I long to go.Shadow of death that brings to quiet closeall miseries that plague the heart and soul,for those in pain the last and best of cures;you heal the flesh of its infirmities,dry and our tears and shut away our toil,and free the good from wrath and fretting cares.

~ Michelangelo Buonarroti

A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.

~ China Miéville

Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.

~ Yukio Mishima

At night the sky is pure astronomy.

~ Nicole Krauss

Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.

~ Joë Bousquet

The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. (The North)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and this struck her as being true.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

And I start to say, no.Start to ask him to please just take it off and put it away.Start to explain how it holds far too many memories for me.But then I remember what Damen said once about memories - that they're haunting things.And because I refuse to be haunted by mine - I just take a deep breath and smile when I say, You know, I think it looks really good on you. You should defiantly keep it.

~ Alyson Noel

Tonight’s going to be one of those things that seem to last forever.

~ Cath Crowley

The universe dilated within him, above him. Something like joy stirred in Lancaster’s being, a sublime ecstasy born of terror. His heart felt as if it might burst, might leap from his chest. His cheeks were wet. Drops of blood glittered on his bare arms, the backs of his hands, his thighs, his feet. Black as the blackest pearls come undone from a string, the droplets lifted from him, drifted from him like a slow motion comet tail, and floated toward the road, the fields. For the first time in an age he heard nothing but the night sounds of crickets, his own breath. His skull was quiet.

~ Laird Barron

Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.

~ Dan Chaon

You know those nights where the day has unfolded in such a way that now, in the night, you can feel all the gaps in your body and you can see all the reasons you’re not who you wish you were - you know those nights where the only sound is of you drinking and the people outside who have each other to drink with - those nights when you’re unable to think or be or do because of the paralyzing loneliness - it feels like a hundred of those nights - stitched together and squared - and they come to me in a blush.

~ Stefan Golaszewski

Moonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. This world molded in lead, where nothing moved but the wind that fell sometimes like a shadow over the gray forests, and where nothing lived but the scent of the naked earth, was the only world he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul.

~ Patrick Süskind

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.

~ Anne Fadiman

The nearer the dawnthe darker the night.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Night poured itself down my throat. Night was my wine and my meat. Night wed me and bedded me, widowed me and murdered me and resurrected me whole a thousand times over with each hour.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law, I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon...

~ Margaret Atwood

There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.

~ Robin Hobb

it'll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night

~ Banana Yoshimoto

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

~ Sebastian Faulks

A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth. He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them.But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. (Hunger)

~ Charles Beaumont

From the floor, I see the tops of the Philadelphia skyline out of her window. Staring at it, I realize that the night sky isn't really black, which is the way I've always thought of it. It's actually a dark shade of blue, the darkest possible.

~ Siobhan Vivian

An Evening AirI go out in the grey eveningIn the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.I go out into the hard loneliness of the barren field of grey eveningIn the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.In the gathering darkness a long, swift train suddenly Passes me like a lighting.Hard and ponderous and loud are the wheels.As ponderous as the darkness, and as beautiful.I look on, enchanted, and listen to the sounds of lamentationIn the soft fragrant air.The long rails, grey-dark, smooth as a serpent, shiver, andA soft, low thing cries out in the distance,But the sounds are hard and heavy,In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.

~ Samar Sen

What a night it was! The jagged masses of heavy dark cloud were rolling at intervals from horizon to horizon, and thin white wreaths covered the stars. Through all the rush of the cloud river the moon swam, breasting the waves and disappearing again in the darkness.I walked up and down, drinking in the beauty of the quiet earth and the changing sky. The night was absolutely silent. Nothing seemed to be abroad. There was no scurrying of rabbits, or twitter of the half-asleep birds. And though the clouds went sailing across the sky, the wind that drove them never came low enough to rustle the dead leaves in the woodland paths. Across the meadows I could see the church tower standing out black and grey against the sky. (Man Size In Marble)

~ E. Nesbit

You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.

~ Arthur Phillips

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he liked--oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!--the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him.

~ Henry James

White-crested waves crash on the shore. The masts sway violently, every which way. In the gray sky the gulls are circling like white flakes. Rain squalls blow past like gray slanting sails, and blue gaps open in the sky. The air brightens. A cold silvery evening. The moon is overhead, and down below, in the water; and all around it-a wide frame of old, hammered, scaly silver. Etched on the silver-silent black fishing boats, tiny black needles of masts, little black men casting invisible lines into the silver. And the only sounds are the occasional plashing of an oar, the creaking of an oarlock, the springlike leap and flip-flop of a fish. (The North)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The night folded around them with a sweetness and poignancy heightened by the new pale stars that prickled silver fire in the water of the lily ponds, by the scented winds, and by the nearness of each other.

~ Pauline Gedge

Viktor looked at the older man’s nightshirt, robe, and nightcap. His lips quirked into a smile. “The hour is late, and the household sleeps. How is it that you are still awake?”“I knew you would be knocking on the door sooner or later.” Pickles looked down his long nose at him. “You have passed the previous six nights with Her Ladyship.”“You are observant, my good man.”“No, Your Highness, I am the one who locks the door at night.” Pickles reached into his robe’s pocket and produced a key. He passed it to the prince, saying, “After tonight, let yourself into thehouse.”Viktor grinned at the majordomo and lifted the key out of his hand. “Your trust honors me.”“You are unlikely to abscond with the silver,” Pickles drawled.

~ Patricia Grasso

I look up upon a sparsely starred abyssHaving wandered to this street cornerIn the middle of the nightWatching the cars and people go byWonderingIf this deep, black nothingnessIs the sum total of being human.

~ Justin Wetch

Under a night’s skyFilled with a hundred billion starsIs it so crazy to believeOur paths were destined to cross?

~ Justin Wetch

But tonight is a gusty, hurrying night . . . even the clouds racing over the sky are in a hurry and the moonlight that gushes out between them is in a hurry to flood the world.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.

~ Anita Shreve