Quotes about the night
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Jorge Luis Borges photo

“We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
Confucius photo

“Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Dr. Seuss photo

“Day
Play
We play all day.
Night
Fight
We fight all night.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

Source: Hop On Pop

John Keats photo

“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

"Bright Star" (1819)
Context: Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art-
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.

Marguerite Duras photo
Don Marquis photo

“Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself, "Have I vibrated in tune with the Infinite today, or have I failed?”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

Source: Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Stephen King photo

“Good days and long nights to ya, sai.”

Variant: Long days and pleasant nights.
Source: Wizard and Glass

Leonard Cohen photo
Mitch Albom photo
Jenny Offill photo
Margaret Atwood photo
Brian Andreas photo

“Resorting to connecting the dots this morning because it was a long night & he needs to do something really simple to get started again.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Traveling Light: Stories & Drawings for a Quiet Mind

Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Markus Zusak photo

“The days and nights come apart. I feel them corroding at the seams.”

Markus Zusak (1975) Australian author

Source: I Am the Messenger

Patrick Rothfuss photo

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

Source: The Wise Man's Fear (2011), Chapter 43, “The Flickering Way” (p. 318)

Mahmoud Darwich photo

“Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.”

Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer

Source: Absent Presence

Scott Lynch photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Yasunari Kawabata photo
Anaïs Nin photo
Anthony Doerr photo
Karen Marie Moning photo
Stephen King photo

“Black as night and as beautiful as forever.”

Source: Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales

Georges Simenon photo
James Patterson photo
Kim Harrison photo
Gillian Flynn photo
Steven Wright photo
Harriet Beecher Stowe photo

“The longest way must have its close - the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.”

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 40 The Martyr
Context: The longest day must have its close — the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.

Tom Stoppard photo
Richelle Mead photo
Jim Morrison photo
Janet Evanovich photo
Ogden Nash photo
David Levithan photo
Laurell K. Hamilton photo
Federico García Lorca photo

“The night below. We two. Crystal of pain.
You wept over great distances.
My ache was a clutch of agonies
over your sickly heart of sand.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Source: Selected Poems

Steven Wright photo
Cornelia Funke photo
Libba Bray photo
Stephen King photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Pablo Neruda photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo

“Save me, Shahara. Save me from the lonely nights that never end. (Syn)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Fire

Richelle Mead photo
Camille Paglia photo

“Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Sarah Dessen photo
Patricia A. McKillip photo
Roald Dahl photo
Ben Carson photo

“One dark night the skeletons that they had carefully hidden in an obscure closet appeared, grabbed them around the throat, and strangled them.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Ruth Rendell photo

“Without me, without me,
Everyday's misery.
But with me - am I wrong?
No night is too long!”

Ruth Rendell (1930–2015) British writer

Source: No Night is Too Long

Jack Kerouac photo
Roberto Cotroneo photo
Marian Wright Edelman photo
Margaret Mitchell photo
Tom Waits photo
Dylan Thomas photo
Robin Hobb photo
Alexander Pope photo

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, "Let Newton be!"”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

and all was light.
Epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton.

Cornelia Funke photo
Poppy Z. Brite photo
Neil deGrasse Tyson photo

“Will I get nights of ecstasy?"
"And days. Ecstasy all the time.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

Euripidés photo
Walt Whitman photo
Philippa Gregory photo
Richelle Mead photo

“Aww, did we masturbate through the tears last night?”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Lothaire

Cassandra Clare photo
Arthur Schnitzler photo
Holly Black photo
Arthur Rimbaud photo

“Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Source: A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

David Levithan photo
Cornelia Funke photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Zelda Fitzgerald photo
Teresa of Ávila photo
Amy Lowell photo
Jack Kerouac photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Tom Petty photo

“Yeah and it's over before you know it.
It all goes by so fast.
Yeah, the bad nights last forever,
And the good nights don't ever seem to last”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

The Best of Everything
Lyrics, Southern Accents (1985)

Sophie Kinsella photo
Steve Wozniak photo
Gabriel García Márquez photo
Roald Dahl photo

“my candle burns at both ends it will not last the night but arh my friends and oh my foes it gives a lovely light”

Edna St. Vincent Millay, in "First Fig" from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920); said to be a motto Roald Dahl lived by.
Misattributed
Variant: My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends —
It gives a lovely light.
Source: Boy: Tales of Childhood

Sylvia Plath photo
Jean Genet photo