Night Quotes (page 37)
Now had the sun to that horizon reach'd, That covers, with the most exalted point. Of its meridian circle, Salem's walls; And night, that opposite to him her orb. Rounds, from the stream of Ganges issued forth, Holding the scales, that from her hands are dropt. When she reigns highest: so that where I was, Aurora's white and vermeil - tinctured cheek. To orange turn'd as she in age increased.
Dante Alighieri
You've got to shake your fists at lightning now, you've got to roar like forest fire. You've got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky. They're going to aim the hoses on you, show 'em you won't expire. Not till you burn up every passion, not even when you die. Come on now, you've got to try, if you're feeling contempt, well then you tell it. If you're tired of the silent night, Jesus, well then you yell it. Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel. That...
Joni Mitchell
Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound and were bandying it to and fro.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
He woke whimpering in the night and the man held him. Shh, he said. Shh. It's okay.
I had a bad dream.
I know.
Should I tell you what it was?
If you want to.
I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary.
Okay.
It was a lot scarier in the dream.
I know. Dreams can be really scary.
Why did I have that scary dream?
I dont...
Cormac McCarthy
Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.
Nick Hornby
Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through the dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric,' a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation,' the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a...
Ian Mcewan
Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?
If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.
Maya Angelou
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
Charles Dickens
I'm telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they'd conclude that most people had children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn't one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren't very flattering.
Jodi Picoult