Night Quotes

It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).

~ Marie Darrieussecq

A man who is awake in the open field at night or who wanders over silent paths experiences the world differently than by day. Nighness vanishes, and with it distance; everything is equally far and near, close by us and yet mysteriously remote. Space loses its measures. There are whispers and sounds, and we do not know where or what they are. Our feelings too are peculiarly ambiguous. There is a strangeness about what is intimate and dear, and a seductive charm about the frightening. There is no longer a distinction between the lifeless and the living, everything is animate and soulless, vigilant and asleep at once. What the day brings on and makes recognizable gradually, emerges out of the dark with no intermediary stages. The encounter suddenly confronts us, as if by a miracle: What is the thing we suddenly see - an enchanted bride, a monster, or merely a log? Everything teases the traveller, puts on a familiar face and the next moment is utterly strange, suddenly terrifies with awful gestures and immediately resumes a familiar and harmless posture.Danger lurks everywhere. Out of the dark jaws of the night which gape beside the traveller, any moment a robber may emerge without warning, or some eerie terror, or the uneasy ghost of a dead man - who knows what may once have happened at that very spot? Perhaps mischievous apparitions of the fog seek to entice him from the right path into the desert where horror dwells, where wanton witches dance their rounds which no man ever leaves alive. Who can protect him, guide him aright, give him good counsel? The spirit of Night itself, the genius of its kindliness, its enchantment, its resourcefulness, and its profound wisdom. She is indeed the mother of all mystery. The weary she wraps in slumber, delivers from care, and she causes dreams to play about their souls. Her protection is enjoyed by the un-happy and persecuted as well as by the cunning, whom her ambivalent shadows offer a thousand devices and contrivances. With her veil she also shields lovers, and her darkness keeps ward over all caresses, all charms hidden and revealed. Music is the true language of her mystery - the enchanting voice which sounds for eyes that are closed and in which heaven and earth, the near and the far, man and nature, present and past, appear to make themselves understood.But the darkness of night which so sweetly invites to slumber also bestows new vigilance and illumination upon the spirit. It makes it more perceptive, more acute, more enterprising. Knowledge flares up, or descends like a shooting star - rare, precious, even magical knowledge.And so night, which can terrify the solitary man and lead him astray, can also be his friend, his helper, his counsellor.

~ Walter F. Otto

Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Un-attained Possibility.

~ Christopher Morley

Sucked in and turned around by the blades, the night at first flows smoothly, but then it starts to take on a denser consistency. Already the night was nearly halfway through its course, so a good portion of it had hardened. Because of this, as I walked through it, it gave me none of the easy, buoyant feeling you get in the early-evening hours. Something about it seemed creaky. But that was, in its own way, typical of the night too.

~ Hiromi Kawakami

Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Every thing is familiar, and everything is strange. It's as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal.

~ James Robertson

Man thalabal ‘ula sahiral layali.” He who wants glory will work late into the night. -184

~ Ahmad Fuadi

It was the time of night that precedes dawn and is without perspective or reason. It was the hour when regret and fear overwhelm hope and courage and when all that is ugly in us is magnified and when we are most panic-stricken by what we have lost, and what we have almost lost, and what we fear we might lose.

~ Alexandra Fuller

Do you not hear the loud gallop of the Storm-riders and the thunderous battle horn from their Heralds, coming from the high seas? Night falls, and so will you.

~ Mladen Đorđević

Here, in the garden at night, it is another world, strange and yet friendly and familiar, never frightening. There is such quietness, such sweetness, such refreshment. Close your eyes. Breathe in again, smell everything mingled together, flowers and earth and leaves and grass. Smell the night.Listen. Nothing at all. Silence, rushing like the sea in your ears.However small and sparse the garden, and wherever it is, even inside a great city, if something grows there, it is a magic place by night. Leave it, walk quietly back towards the lights that shine out of the house. You will take its magic with you.Now, you will sleep.

~ Susan Hill

Nothing was more beautiful than a night sky dusted with stars. Nothing was more terrible than a night sky scrawled with a thousand destinies. Night was inevitable. Like me.

~ Roshani Chokshi

Night heralded sleep and shadows, demons and dreams. But I heralded the night.

~ Roshani Chokshi

She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that’s broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate.

~ Jardine Libaire

The sun loves the moon so much that he dies every night to let her breathe, and in return, she reflects his love.

~ Jeffrey Fry

These summer nights are short. Going to bed before midnight is unthinkable and talk, wine, moonlight and the warm air are often in league to defer it one, two or three hours more. It seems only a moment after falling asleep out of doors that dawn touches one gently on the shoulder, and, completely refreshed, up one gets, or creeps into the shade or indoors for another luxurious couple of hours. The afternoon is the time for real sleep: into the abyss one goes to emerge when the colours begin to revive and the world to breathe again about five o'clock, ready once more for the rigours and pleasures of late afternoon, the evening, and the night.

~ Patrick Leigh Fermor

The dawn is your enemy.

~ Adult Swim

Don’t wait up for me tonight, for the night will be black and white.

~ Gérard De Nerval

We take a last look out of the window at the night, and I send a silent wish to everyone out there for this kind of warmth.

~ Nina Lacour

Last night, I was a mad man searching for a whiff of your fragrance. The stars and the moon even laughed at me.

~ Avijeet Das

It was raining that night, when we kissed for the first time.

~ Avijeet Das

Persons in whom a crisis takes place pass the night preceding the paroxysm uncomfortably, but the succeeding night generally more comfortably.

~ Hippocrates

Why didn't anyone question It's been a hard days night Who talks like that anyway?

~ Chuck Bridges

It is inevitable that there will come a time when mankind will go out more at night and stay indoors during the day to avoid harmful solar rays.

~ Nabil N. Jamal

I’m here for you. Always. Do you feel me?Hear me? I talk to you every night, does it reach you?

~ Charlotte Eriksson

And all of the late, late-night talks, when you're not stoned, but you're so tired you might as well be, when you just sit there glowing with warmth, and all of those things that you really hope for come out, and you connect with each other on such deep levels that, when you think about it the next day, you wonder if it was real - if the others felt it too.

~ Steven Brust

Outside the windows, everything is getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night.

~ Alexandra Kleeman

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity. By day, space is one with the earth and with man--it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past; at night, space is his no more.

~ Henry Beston

Did you have a sad day? Don’t worry, you have all the night to compensate for it! Did you have a sad night? Don’t worry, you have all the day to compensate for it!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.

~ Virginia Woolf

She wanted to reach up to the night and dig her fingers into it, beg it to stay just a little bit longer.

~ Adi Alsaid

One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

~ Elie Wiesel

It was easy to conclude: The night was young and alive, in its ever so subtle way.

~ Lauren Lola

It was a beautiful spring night, the air rain-washed and smelling of crushed blossoms, and Henry felt as if the muscles of his body were singing in unison.

~ Peter Swanson

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.

~ Ken Kesey

Why are we sneaking out in the night?” Jack repeated.“I already explained,” Sam snapped. “If you don’t listen—”Taylor jumped in to say, “Because otherwise Astrid would find some way to stop him.” She mimicked Astrid’s voice, injecting it with steel and a tense, condescending tone. “Sam. I am the smartest, hottest girl in the world. So do what I tell you. Good boy. Down, boy. Down!”Sam remained silent, walking steadily just a few feet ahead.Taylor continued, “Oh, Sam, if only you could be as smart plus as totally goody-goody as I am. If only you could realize that you will never be good enough to have me, me, wonderful me, Astrid the Blond Genius.”“Sam, can I shoot her now?” Dekka asked. “Or is it too soon?”“Wait until we’re over the ridge,” Sam said. “It’ll muffle the sound.”“Sorry, Dekka,” Taylor said. “I know you don’t like talking about boy-girl things.”“Taylor,” Sam warned.“Yes, Sam?”“You might want to think about how hard it would be to walk if someone were to turn off gravity under your feet every now and then.”“I wonder who would do that?” Dekka said.Suddenly Taylor fell flat on her face.“You tripped me!” Taylor said, more shocked than angry.“Me?” Dekka spread her hands in a completely unconvincing gesture of innocence. “Hey, I’m all the way over here.”“I’m just saying: you can see where that could make a long walk just a lot longer,” Sam said.“You guys are so not fun,” Taylor grumped. She bounced instantaneously to just behind Sam. She grabbed his butt, he yelled, “Hey!” and she bounced away innocently.“To answer your question, Jack,” Sam said, “we are sneaking out at night so that everyone doesn’t know we’re gone and why. They’ll figure it out soon enough, but Edilio will have to have more of his guys on the streets if I’m not there playing the big, bad wolf. More stress for everyone.”“Oh,” Jack said.“The big, bad wolf,” Taylor said. She laughed. “So, when you play that fantasy in your head is Astrid Little Red Riding Hood or one of the Three Little Pigs?”“Dekka,” Sam said.“Hah! Too slow!

~ Michael Grant

Rape, cockroaches... are still a real nightmare.

~ Deyth Banger

A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can't stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

Time did exist here, in small amounts (well some of the time) – and there were feint eddies and currents of time here, things that were barely tangible. Feint forces of the universe they were, nearly indiscernible from the nothingness like a warm breeze on a hot summer night. How long he had been here, he knew not – but he was slowly learning to master these barely tangible waves like a new surfer with one foot on the sandy beach and the other on a shiny new board of Hatred. Revenge splashed around his feet like the cold waves of the ocean of Time. Nearby, two other inmates collided with each other, bounced apart spread-eagled and spiraled off into the distance in infinite slowness. The Wetsuit of Insanity clung to his spiritual body, isolating him from the timelessness that seemed to exist here. A wind of Change blew at him from behind and he pushed off from the beach with iron determination and a mental clarity hereto before unknown to him. Something in the microcosm that didn’t even have a name went ‘bling’ and against all the laws of probability, Brad Xyl opened his eyes.

~ Christina Engela

Tread not into the fearsome nightBut pull the covers high,Step not into the wild dark woodFor the Hobbers are dancing nigh

~ Robin Jarvis

Sunsets.The illusion either above the horizon or below it. When day and night are linked in a way that cannot be one without the other, yet they cannot exist at the same time.

~ Ebelsain Villegas

All he could do was wait like this, patiently, until it grew light out and the birds awoke and began their day. All he could do was trust in the birds, in all the birds, with their wings and beaks.

~ Haruki Murakami