“Mother Night and May The Darkness Be Merciful!”
Source: Daughter of the Blood
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Anne Bishop 39
American fiction writer 1955Related quotes
“May Morning, as the proverb runs, appear
Bearing glad tidings from his mother Night!”
Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Agamemnon, lines 264–265 (tr. E. H. Plumptre)
Preface to Pantheon Edition
Bandits (1969)
World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000)
Part 2, Book 1, Ch. 2
Variant translation: What makes night within us may leave stars.
Source: Ninety-Three (1874)
Context: Cimourdain was a pure-minded but gloomy man. He had "the absolute" within him. He had been a priest, which is a solemn thing. Man may have, like the sky, a dark and impenetrable serenity; that something should have caused night to fall in his soul is all that is required. Priesthood had been the cause of night within Cimourdain. Once a priest, always a priest.
Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background.
Fiction, Hypnos (1922)
Context: May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned frensy into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was — my only friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!
