Quotes about the night
page 26

“I guess I shoulda closed my eyes
When U drove me 2 the place
Where your horses run free.
'Cuz I felt a little ill
When I saw all the pictures
Of the jockeys that were there before me.Believe it or not,
I started to worry
I wondered if I had enough class.
But it was Saturday night
I guess that makes it all right
And U say, "Baby, have U got enough gas?"”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Little Red Corvette
Song lyrics, 1999 (1982)

Horse, Baby

“It's 2 o'clock in the morning and I just can't sleep
Outside the rain is pourin', I'm lonely as can be
Maybe 2night'll be different than the nights before
I need 2 feel someone beside me, I can't be alone no more”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Somebody's Somebody, written by Prince, Brenda Lee Eager, and Hilliard Wilson
Song lyrics, Emancipation (1996)

Feeling, Sleep

“He was picking speed as the city spread its twinkling lights below him.
But he paid no heed as the shivering thoughts of the nights
delights went through him.
His foot nudged the brakes to slow him down.
But the pedal floored easy without a sound.
He said "Christ!"
It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now.
He was trapped inside a dead-end hellslide,
riding on his fear-hunched back
was every one of those yellow green
I'm telling you thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of bananas.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

30,000 Pounds of Bananas
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)

Fear, Light, Christ, Speed

“In every hedge and ditch both day and night
We fear our death, of every leafe affright.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

Second Week, First Day, Part iii. Compare: "The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies", William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act iii. Sc. 1.
La Seconde Semaine (1584)

Death, Fear

“In all this, I have made no mention of punched cards and all the other hardware. The CRG would have been hard put to it to ignore this, even if it had wanted to, which it does not. We believe, however, that there will, in the foreseeable future, remain a need for classification to provide research workers with the opportunity for browsing and for imposing some discipline on a literature that tends always towards greater disorder. We believe that, since hundreds of millions of dollars and rubles are being spent on hardware, and fat volumes roll off the presses almost day and night, that ten shillings a year that the CRG collects from its members will not be missed.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 137

Literature, Future

“.. the light suggests no particular time of day or night [in the paintings of Paul Cézanne ]; it is not appropriated from morning or afternoon, sunlight or shadow.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

1950s
Source: Abstract Expressionism, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990; p. 145

Light, Time, Painting

“If we have nothing to do but service our own pleasure – because society has taught us that's all we're worth and we're exiled from positions of authority from which we could actually shape society – then we just become hedonists. Eventually, despite how great it may look on Saturday night, come Monday morning there's just purposelessness.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

The Advocate (Feb. 21, 1995)

Pleasure

“You meaner beauties of the night,
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light;
You common people of the skies,
What are you when the sun shall rise?”

Henry Wotton (1568–1639) English ambassador

On His Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia, stanza 1 (1624). In some versions "moon" replaces "sun". This was printed with music as early as 1624, in Est's "Sixth Set of Books", for example.

People, Beauty, Light, Sun

“And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Diary entry of Saturday noon (10 February?)
Nausea (1938)

Feeling, Future, Forgetting

“Listen to me, skull!
Under your thin brittle boneplates
what black memories haunt you?
What do you want? What do you dream of? …
Is it your soul you think of,
flickering through frightful nights? …
Skull, I must have been raving mad
to smash you with my bare fist.
Scarlet blood thickens on my fingers,
plagues me to spew these rhymes, and still
my teeth want to tear you to pieces!
Like a raven I'll swallow even the sucked-out bones
to get a fresh taste of the past,
a drop from the torrent of months and years.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"Skull", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), ISBN 978-0394494722, p. 166 <br class="br"> Original in Vietnamese https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/che-lan-vien-to-a-skull/vietnamese/, and an English translation by Hai-Dang Phan https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/che-lan-vien-to-a-skull/, available at Asymptote.

Dreams, Soul, Thinking, Tear

“We are going to be posted all round the shores as a guard upon them, and in that state to wait for the return of the fleet, which, by the by, I think will not be in a hurry. It is reported that Lord Howe arrived last night with his fleet and the re enforcement mentioned in your Excellency's letter to General Sullivan. If the report is true, we got off the island in very good season.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Thinking, Waiting, Season

“That hour, o' night's black arch the keystane.”

Robert Burns Tam o' Shanter

Source: Tam o' Shanter (1790), Line 69

“For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

On the Mindless Menace of Violence (1968)

Men, Hunger, Books, School

“I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

God, Family, Feeling, Home

“A lot of people think that scuttling around stenciling images onto buildings in the middle of the night is the action of a sad, frustrated individual who can't get attention or recognition any other way. They might be right, but I've done gallery shows and, if you've been hitting on people with all sorts of images in all sorts of places, they're a real step backwards, painting the streets means becoming an actual part of the city. It's not a spectator sport.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Tristan Manco, Stencil Graffiti
Other sources

People, Sadness, Way, Thinking

“Michelle was so mature beyond her years, so thoughtful and perceptive. She really prodded me about what the job would be like because she had lots of choices. I offered it to her on the spot, which was totally inappropriate because I should have talked to the mayor first. But I just knew she was really special.
Barack never grills. That's part of what is so effective about him: He puts you completely at ease, and the next thing you know he's asking more and more probing questions and gets you to open up and reflect a little bit. That night we talked about his childhood compared to my childhood and realized we both had rather…unusual childhoods.
Married in 1983, separated in 1987, and divorced in 1988. Enough said. He was a physician. He passed away. I want to say in about 1991.
We grew up together. We were friends since childhood. In a sense, he was the boy next door. I married without really appreciating how hard divorce would be.
I have to tell you: My daughter is in seventh heaven about me being in Vogue. Nothing else I have done has fazed her at all. But this! She's like, 'Oh, Mom. You don't understand. This is really big.'
I have never heard him yell, Ever. Not once in seventeen years. He's not a yeller.
Because my dad worked at the university, he could swing by and take Laura to school and pick her up from her first day of nursery school until the day she graduated from high school. They would often have breakfast and have these wonderful conversations.”

Valerie Jarrett (1956) Chicago lawyer, businesswoman, civic leader; senior advisor to U.S. Senator Barack Obama

September 2008 interview with Vogue https://web.archive.org/web/20080930190831/http://www.style.com/vogue/feature/2008_Oct_Valerie_Jarrett//

School, Boy, Moms, Understanding

“It was pretty clear to me and to them. I mean, most of my family are artists; my grandma, she’s a painter and she sleeps during the day and paints all night; she has all these health problems but she’s a devoted and committed artist. I was on the phone with her this morning and she said the best thing which was, ‘I’m in my second childhood, I should enjoy it.’ She’s in her 90s.”

Zoey Deutch (1994) American actress

Interview with Wonderland Magazine https://www.wonderlandmagazine.com/2017/07/14/zoey-deutch/

Health, Family, Problem, Sleep

“The supernatural light of the spirit is the only night from which the spirit can emerge alive.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

Ransoming the Time (1941), p. 288.

Light

“May we feel after Thee; still calling out in the darkness, as children waking in the night call "Father," so may we call out for God; and, at times, even if we do not hear Thy voice, may there be the form of a hand resting upon us, and that shall be enough; for we shall take hold of it, though it be in the dark, and it shall guide us to the growing light; for the day shall come, and the release and triumph.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 595

God, Children, Feeling, Light

“Sum up at night what thou has done by day.”

Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) Anglo-Welsh soldier, diplomat, historian, poet and religious philosopher

This line, in the more grammatical form, "Sum up at night what thou hast done by day", is from George Herbert's The Temple, The Church Porch, line 451.
Misattributed

“I'm sitting in the railway station.
Got a ticket to my destination.
On a tour of one-night stands my suitcase and guitar in hand.
And ev'ry stop is neatly planned for a poet and a one-man band.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Homeward Bound
Song lyrics, Parsley (1966)

“Tuesday, January 13, 1835: We made the land at Point Conception... the point of Santa Barbara, to which we were bound, lying about fifty miles to the southeast of this point, we continued sailing down the coast during the day and the following night, and on the next morning.

On the whole coast of California there was not a lighthouse, a beacon, or a buoy, and the charts were made up from old and disconnected surveys by British, Russian, and Mexican voyagers. Birds of prey and passage swooped and dived about us, wild beasts ranged through the oak groves... herds of deer came to the water's edge.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. book Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast (1840)

Lying, Bird, Water

“When the night-wind bewaileth the fall of the year,
And sweeps from the forest the leaves that are sere;
I wake from my slumber and list to the roar
And it saith to my spirit, "No more, never more!"”

Epes Sargent (1813–1880) American editor, poet and playwright

When the Night-wind bewaileth, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“I really like Chris [Cornell]'s records and I think he's the best singer that we've got on the planet. I first met Chris when I moved to Seattle, and we started hanging around. I didn't know what musicians did with their life, and I quickly realized that what he did on a Friday night was to get a 12-pack of shitty beer and chase his dog around on the mud for four hours in the forest. That was about an exciting an epiphany as I had! I haven't seen him in town for a while, but I have taken over the whole dog-chasing practice – me and my Hawaiian mutt. The beer's gotten slightly better too.”

Eddie Vedder (1964) musician, songwriter, member of Pearl Jam

Q&A with Ed Vedder, Uncut Magazine, September 2009 http://www.pearljamonline.it/interviste/uncut09.htm,

Life, Dogs, Beer, Thinking

“The establishment of "The Times" newspaper is an example, on a large scale, of a manufactory in which the division of labour, both mental and bodily, is admirably illustrated, and in which also the effect of domestic economy is well exemplified. It is scarcely imagined, by the thousands who read that paper in various quarters of the globe, what a scene of organized activity the factory presents during the whole night, or what a quantity of talent and mechanical skill is put in action for their amusement and information.”

Charles Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

Source: On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 1832/1841, p. 270; Ch. 28 "Proper circumstances for the application of machinery."

Imagination, Time, Reading

“I was growing inward incessantly; like an animal that hibernates during the wintertime, I could hear other peoples' voices with my ears; my own voice, however, I could hear only in my throat. The loneliness and the solitude that lurked behind me were like a condensed, thick, eternal night, like one of those nights with a dense, persistent, sticky darkness which waits to pounce on unpopulated cities filled with lustful and vengeful dreams.”

Sadegh Hedayat book The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl

People, Dreams, Solitude, Waiting

“The strange light illuminated all those night-time meetings that took place in every imaginable sort of café; the lips mouthing defiant words, heedless of restraint or consequence, often overbearing and brutal as only Norwegians can be, vast shadows of impotence misery and shabbiness – spirits training for fulfillment, striving in vain to be great, complete, unique. [Munch describes the environment and atmosphere of the Norwegian bohemia in Kristiana, where he himself lived and worked when he was about 23] And at the center of all the faces there would be Jaeger, whose logic was as sharp as a scythe and as cold as an icy blast..”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

in Edvard Munch, Pola Gaugain, Oslo Aschehoug, 1933, p. 15
after 1930

Imagination, Light, Time, Training

“Poets have imagined no utterance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh. And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this strange man looked inward at his own heart, and burst into laughter that rolled away into the night, and was indistinctly reverberated among the hills.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

p, 125
"Ethan Brand" (1850)

Imagination, Laughter, Heart

“I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light. … Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us — many days, many nights of stars.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

War Within and Without (1980)

Life, Beauty, Star, Light

“You'll never get my mind right
like 2 ships passing in the night.”

Amy Winehouse (1983–2011) English singer and songwriter

In My Bed
Song lyrics, Frank (2003)

“You see my adjutant made rather a silly mistake. He hadn't had much truck with boots before and the silly fellow thought they were extra rations. My men ate the whole bag of tricks last night.”

Evelyn Waugh book Black Mischief

Source: Black Mischief (1932), Chapter 5

Men

“As for myself, I confess to a preference for clear-cut situations, for radical and even extreme positions. But I also feel a secret and very strong attraction to ambiguous situations… for example, that hovering moment when it is no longer day and not yet night, the shades of emotion between indifference and friendship… (they) are so fascinating because they are so indefinable. That which is pure transition, is all the more appealing to the mind because of its elusiveness. It is the same in the cases of Mondrian, Kandinsky and the Cubists: abstraction and figuration have a common frontier in their work that is so tenuous that we often do not know which side we are on. It is this ambiguity that imports a rare poetic charm to their paintings. Artists like Klee, Miro and Dubuffet have also pitched their tents on this borderline and constantly travel from one side tot the other.”

Michel Seuphor (1901–1999) designer, draughtsman, painter

Source: Abstract Painting (1964), pp. 43/44: (1962)

Friendship, Secret, Travel, Feeling

“I see a face of love,
Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong:
Yea — art thou come again to me, great Song?"
The face bent over him like silver night
In long-remembered summers; that calm light
Of days which shine in firmaments of thought,
That past unchangeable, from change still wrought.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

Love, Art, Music, Light

“Helen whose face was fatal must have wept
Many salt tears to keep her eyes so bright
Many long nights alone: and every night
Men died, she cried, and happy Paris kept
Sweet Helen.”

T. H. White (1906–1964) author

"PARIS".

Men, Tear, Happiness

“99,9% of men are convinced that they have to live silently, with a bitter irony of the twist of fate, that means, nobody knows they're really a spy. And an amazing guitarist. Men give serious time and thought on "How would I deal with, if the rocket came down of that alley right now? Yeah, I'd handle that situation pretty well!" A spy who plays guitar at night! I basically think, you know, I'm what would have happened if James Dean had lived and discovered carbohydrates and orthopaedic shoes. You have to tell yourself this bullshit just to keep going! Cause you're constantly being reminded how redundant you are!”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On men.
What It Is (2009)

Men, Fate, Shoe, Thinking

“Our beautiful planet is indeed worthy of our study; it was once our cradle—it will soon be our grave: between the dawn and the night of life, it is the scene of our busy action, and from it we shall rise to another state of being.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

Vol. 1
The Wonders of Geology (1839)

Life, Beauty, Business, Study

“I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A. A. lives with a drunk. … I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred — because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right — when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

On his role in the parole of Jack Abbott, during which Abbot killed a man.
Interview for French TV (1998)

Hope, Way, Time, Help

“She prays to God most every night
And though she swears he doesn't listen there's a little hope in her he might.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Grey Street
Busted Stuff (2002)

God, Hope

“To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They’ve always been a cigar. When I first made Night of the Living Dead, it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon’s Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way. My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.”

George A. Romero (1940–2017) American-Canadian film director, film producer, screenwriter and editor

As quoted in George A. Romero: "Who Says Zombies Eat Brains?", Vanity Fair (27 May 2010) http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/05/george-romero

Way, Dead

“I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion’s leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night – as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here’s Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Quoted in Andrew Lawless, "Those burnt tongue moments - Chuck Palahniuk in interview" http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_article_chuck_palahniuk_haunted_interview.htm, Three Monkeys (May 2005)

Love, Death, People, Books

“As governor, I experienced the vitality of life in a booming and free Asian city, saw routinely the best and worst aspects of human nature, and was made to revisit some of the principles in which I have always believed but to which I had rarely given much thought previously. In the darker hours of occasionally fretful nights I found myself face to face with the moral dimensions of political action to a greater extent than ever before.”

Chris Patten book East and West

Chris Patten, East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the Future, Pan Books, second edition, 1999, page 3.

Life, Nature

“Mr. Martin Tanner, a baritone, of Dayton, Ohio made his Town Hall debut last night. He came well prepared, but unfortunately his presentation was not up to contemporary professional standards. His voice lacks the range of tonal color necessary to make it consistently interesting.
Full time consideration of another endeavor might be in order.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Mr. Tanner
Song lyrics, Short Stories (1974)

Color, Time

“Breathe out, so that your breath travels infinitely to the ends of the universe: breathe in, so that your breath reaches your one point and continues infinitely there. The ki breathing methods are an important way of unifying mind and body. At night when all is quiet and calm, do this alone, and you will feel that you are the universe and that the universe is you. It will lead you to supreme ecstasy of being one with the universe. At this moment the life power that is rightfully yours is fully activated.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

15 : Ki breathing exercises
Ki Sayings (2003)

Life, Way, Travel, Feeling

“The night had passed completely. The morning star shone in the sky. I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded - and devoured - by a black flame.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Soul, Star, Personality

“A heavy blanket of snow fell last night obscuring the ground and much of the trash that has collected during the winter. If only we could cover our past misdeeds in the same way.”

Virgil John Tangborn (1920–1944)

January 15, 1941

Way, Winter, Past

“Many women do not like to sleep on the ground floor, being afraid to leave their windows open at night. With ridge-dormers standing open, the lower windows may be kept closed and locked, while the room will be perfectly ventilated without them.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Women, Sleep

“Well, art is not communist -- not bourgeois either
It's no club and has no party line
Not wild nights make an artist -- not drugs or manifestos
It's art -- HA HA -- that's no secret
The one who makes art -- he's the artist..”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

1920s, Huelsendada', Kurt Schwitters, 1920

Secret, Art

“What earthly use are these Confucian graphs?
Masters and doctors lie curled up and wilt.
Why not take lessons and become a clerk?
At night champagne, at break of day cow's milk!”

Trần Tế Xương (1870–1907) poet

Poem 71 in An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, trans. Huỳnh Sanh Thông (Yale University Press, 1996), ISBN 978-0300064100
Variant translation:
What good are Chinese characters?
All those Ph.D.'s are out of work.
Much better to be a clerk for the French:
You get milk in the morning and champagne at night.
Source: Understanding Vietnam by Neil L. Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), ISBN 978-0520916586, p. 55

Lie

“Night threw her shadow on the world. Sailors out at sea looked up at the circling Bear and the stars of Orion. Travellers and watchmen longed for sleep, and oblivion came at last to mothers mourning for their children's death. In the town, dogs ceased to bark and men to call to one another; silence reigned over the deepening dark. But gentle sleep did not visit Medea. In her yearning for Jason, fretful cares kept her awake. She feared the great strength of the bulls; she saw him face them in the field of Ares; she saw him meet an ignominious end. Her heart fluttered within her, restless…”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book III. Jason and Medea, Lines 744–755

Death, Men, Children, World

“We went to Kyoto -- back to Japan -- to work in the Matsuo Tiasha shrine which Sei Shonagon had visited regularly. I couldn't give up such an opportunity. I was also a little homesick. We didn't finish walking the cat-walk until midnight when all the audience had gone. I didn't mind -- Sei Shonagon had watched the moon rise in that garden a thousand years ago -- I could have walked up and down that path all night long.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Nagiko's journal for Nov 9 1997
The Pillow Book

Cats

“The nights are no longer warm,
The green tomatoes are cold to their cores,
The sparrows rock empty feeders with fright,
The doves linger forlornly in the low junipers,
The lights of the city thicken the November night.”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

Mirkka Rekola. " Stanzas," translated in: Eamonn Wall (2008), A Tour of Your Country. p. 12

Light

“New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.”

Norman Mailer book Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Pt. 2, p. 83
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)

World, Angels, Game, Past

“Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

Source: Misattributed, P. J. O'Rourke, as quoted in Busted : Stone Cowboys, Narco-lords, and Washington's War on Drugs (2002) edited by Mike Gray.

People, Marijuana, Madness

“History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. … Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is perserved, and this transformed existence — the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit's knowledge — is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book The Phenomenology of Spirit

The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

World, History, Knowledge, Time

“I've never been one for late nights, which is why I have always preferred making films to theatre. A play takes over your life: you start to feel sick at lunchtime and by mid-afternoon you're wishing for a bomb scare so the whole thing will be called off. Of course, if the evening goes well and you get the applause then it's wonderful. We're a strange bunch, we actors.”

Charles Dance

Charles Dance's diary http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/charles-dances-diary-6407964.html (June 3, 2011)

Life, Feeling

“Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 12, st. 4.
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Lying, Lovers, Sleep

“The other night was like when my daughter was being born and I was in the waiting room. You are waiting for good news and obviously the good news didn't come through this time.”

Phil Brown (footballer) (1959) English association football player and manager

20-Feb-2009, Hull Daily Mail
Waiting for news on Jimmy Bullard's knee injury. Unfortunately, it turned out Bullard wasn't even pregnant.

Time, Waiting, Daughters

“The light would reach us more quickly in the morning and fade more slowly at night if the whole earth were divided into vast flower beds that called forth the light at dawn and clutched it longer at nightfall. Nature instituted summer for flowers long before man took summer over for his own uses.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

Flowers, Nature, Light, Summer

“How can we help loving best those who first gave us possession of ourselves? All the day long they were together: living as they did, they could not help being so; only parting at night for a few short hours to dream over the happy past day, and to meet again the next morning, the happier for their brief separation. It was a new life to him: what had often hung before him as a fairy vision — what he had longed for, but never found; and here, as if sent down from heaven, was what more than answered to his wildest dreams. Now for the first time he found himself loved for himself — slighted and neglected as he had been …. suddenly he was singled out by a fascinating woman, who made no secret of the pleasure his friendship gave her.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Arthur's commentary
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Love, Life, Friendship, Pleasure

“Walkin' the Tightrope, steppin' on my friends
Walkin' the tight rope, it was a shame and a sin.
Walkin the tight rope between wrong and right.
Walkin the tight-rope both day and night.”

Stevie Ray Vaughan (1954–1990) American guitarist, songwriter and recording artist

"Tightrope", In Step
Song lyrics

“Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon —
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night —
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley To Night

To Night (1821), st. 5

Death, Art, Sleep, Dead

“After three days we reached land, and for twenty-eight days journeyed through uninhabited country, and the food ran out and hunger overtook them; and one day the steersman began saying: "Why is it, Christian? You say your God is great and all-powerful; then why can you not pray for us? For we may perish of hunger; it is unlikely indeed that we shall ever see another human being." In fact, I said to them, confidently: "Be converted by faith with all your heart to my Lord God, because nothing is impossible for him, so that today he will send food for you on your road, until you be sated, because everywhere he abounds." And with God's help this came to pass; and behold, a herd of swine appeared on the road before our eyes, and they slew many of them, and remained there for two nights, and the were full of their meat and well restored, for many of them had fainted and would otherwise have been left half dead by the wayside. And after this they gave the utmost thanks to God, and I was esteemed in their eyes, and from that day they had food abundantly.”

Saint Patrick (385–461) 5th-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland

The Confession (c. 452?)

Hunger, God, Faith, Food

“One of the men in the boat—I could not remember which character—had moved through all of the circles of theological supposition: praying, believing that God was a merciful Deity who sat up nights worrying about him, then believing that God was a cruel bastard, and finally deciding that no one was listening.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 34 (p. 344)

Men, God

“Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell. Not vapour Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera at all!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Men, People, Fear, Hope

“When in your last hour (think of this) all faculty in the broken spirit shall fade away, and sink into inanity — imagination, thought, effort, enjoyment — then will the flower of belief, which blossoms even in the night, remain to refresh you with its fragrance in the last darkness.”

Jean Paul (1763–1825) German novelist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 238.

Imagination, Flowers, Thinking, Effort

“I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatch'd with me the envious night:
They know that never joy illum'd my brow
Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou, O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 6
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)

Love, World, Hope, Heart

“For May wol have no slogardie a-night.
The seson priketh every gentil herte,
And maketh him out of his slepe to sterte.”

Geoffrey Chaucer book The Canterbury Tales

General Prologue, l. 1044
The Canterbury Tales

“He said, 'The royal robe I wear
Trails all along the fields of light:
Its silent blue and silver bear
For gems the starry dust of night.'
'The breath of joy unceasingly
Waves to and fro its folds starlit,
And far beyond earth's misery
I live and breathe the joy of it.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Light, Joy

““Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically… shallow.”
“Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said.
“Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said.
“No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’”
“A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said.
Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.
“Religion seems to have always offered that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.””

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 10 (p. 166)

Love, Death, Religion, Silence

“Had there not been a natural goodness and indestructible force in my father, I see not how be could have bodied himself forth from these mean impediments. I suppose good precepts were not wanting. There was the Bible to read. Old John Orr, the schoolmaster, used from time to time to lodge with them; be was religious and enthusiastic (though in practice irregular with drink). In my grandfather, also, there seems to have been a certain geniality; for instance, he and a neighbor, Thomas Hogg, read "Anson's Voyages;" also tho "Arabian Nights," for which latter my father, armed with zealous conviction, scrupled not to censure them openly. By one means and another, at an early age he had acquired principles, lights that not only flickered, but shone steadily to guide his way.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Age, Way, Drink, Nature

“During the last years of the war I went to live in BROOKLYN in the most forlorn region of the oceanic tragic city, in Williamsburg, near the bridge. Brooklyn gave me a sense of liberation. The vast view of her sky, in opposition to the narrow one of NEW YORK, was a relief — and at night, in her solitude, I used to find, intact, the green freedom of my own self.”

Joseph Stella (1877–1946) American artist

Source: "The Brooklyn Bridge (A page of my life)," 1929, p. 86

War, Sense, Solitude, Freedom

“The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

As quoted in Golden Gleams of Thought from the Words of Leading Orators, Divines, Philosophers, Statesmen and Poets (1881) by S. Pollock Linn; also in Still Waters http://books.google.com/books?id=VjAqAAAAYAAJ (1913)

Star, Light

“I've been wrapped around her finger
Since the first time we went out.
Every day and every night she's all I think about.
I need that girl beside me
When the lights go out.
I think it's time to put a ring on the finger
I'm wrapped around.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

Wrapped Around, written by Brad Paisley, Chris DuBois, and Kelley Lovelace.
Song lyrics, Part II (2001)

Girl, Thinking, Light, Time

“Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what…”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Feeling

“I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, my god-damned friends, White, they're the ones who keep me walking the floor nights!”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

Remark to editor William Alan White, as quoted in Thomas Harry Williams et al. (1959) A History of the United States.
1920s

God

“I woke up from a nap the other night. Everyone is cranky when they wake up. I thought to myself: 'I have no right to be cranky. I'm so lucky.' On my way to go to a restaurant, I get out of the car and I see this person on crutches. His sign says that he has AIDS and that his immune system is low. You know, he's broke, and his family won't talk to him because they can't eat because of the hospital bills. He didn't do this. The system did it - so that when someone has a chronic disease, it sucks him dry. He could have been in that same restaurant two years ago, eating and tipping big. I felt blessed that I could drop a fifty on him.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

Detour, (1993)

Disease, Family, Cars, Way

“She got convinced in her crazy head that I had sex with this girl in Columbus, Ohio…and I did, and I'll tell you why. When you enter into a monogamous relationship with somebody, you usually do it at a point in the relationship when you're having a lot of sex. So you're willing to sign the papers. "I'll only have sex with you, ever-ever-ever…ever." Well, if that person stops having sex altogether… why, you find yourself in quite a pickle. I'm a pretty good dog, but if you don't pet me every once in awhile, it's hard to keep me under the porch. I'm not as flexible as real dog. And I'll tell you what happened, too. I was in Columbus, Ohio, and I haven't been laid in three months. Three months! You can't go three months without having sex with me. I'll go have sex with somebody else. I know, I've seen me do it. I did a show one night. I came offstage, there's gorgeous woman, maybe 35, 40 years old, long black dress, slit up to her waist, GORGEOUS. Gimme a second. Just…And I walk off stage, she goes, "I thought you were hilarious. I wanna buy you a drink." I'm like, "I can't do that, I'm married." And she says, "I didn't ask if you wanna have sex, big boy. I asked if you wanna have a drink at my place."…Alright. Now, you know of that little guy that sits on your shoulder and reminds you of your prior commitments and your moral fortitude? I didn't hear a peep out of that guy. He hadn't been laid in 3 months either. He was speechless for like 20 minutes then he was like, "Suck her titty!"…"I was gonna!" I was having a 3-way with my conscience. Soon as the whole thing's over, he's back at his post, saying, "That was wrong, mister!" "Hey! 15 minutes ago, you were beating off on my shoulder, monkey boy!"”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

I hate him. He smokes pot. He burned a hole in my other jacket.
They Call Me Tater Salad

Hate, Dogs, Sex, Way

“Corben's technique introduced the airbrush to comics. His sophisticated knowledge of how color is printed allowed him to get fantastic results. His work has maintained a sense of humor and spectacle in tales of barbarians, time travelers and Arabian nights.|Harvey Kurtzman”

Richard Corben (1940) American illustrator

[Kurtzman, Harvey, From Aargh! to Zap!, Prentice Hall Press, New York, 1991, 88, 978-0-13-363680-2]</ref>}}

Color, Travel, Knowledge, Sense

“I thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence.”

John Lewis (civil rights leader) (1940) American politician and civil rights leader

Academy of Achievement web site http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/lew0pro-1 (url accessed on October 22, 2008)

Death, Question, Freedom, Time

“There is a reason why you only see those adventurous types marching off into crocodile infested waters and uncharted jungles up the Congo. Marching into somewhere like Newcastle city centre on a Saturday night is too damn wild, that’s why. I became overwhelmed with a desire to go to Sunderland. And it’s not very often you hear someone say that.”

David Baboulene (1960) UK author

Jumping Ships (2009)

Water

“Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

"What Is the Connection Between Men and Women?" Mademoiselle (February 1970)

Women, Men, Animals

“Then rose the strife of kings about the hill of night; but it was soft as two summer gales, shaking their light wings on a lake.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"Cathlin of Clutha"
The Poems of Ossian

Light, Summer

“The difference between East Germans and North Koreans is day and night.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with the Reuters War College (April 2017)

“You are like a star in my night
I'm gonna make it alright
Yes I am”

Jack Vidgen (1997) Australian singer

Song Yes I Am, released August 3, 2011

Star

“507. All Cats are alike grey in the Night.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Cats

“Day and night, and every moment, there are voices about us. All the hours speak as they pass; and in every event there is a message to us; and all our circumstances talk with us; but it is in Divine language, that worldliness misunderstands, that selfishness is frightened at, and that only the children of God hear rightly and happily.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 266.

God, Children, Selfishness

“Spread sail! For it is Hope today that like a wind new-risen
Doth waft us on a golden wing towards a new horizon,
That is the sun before our sight, the beacon for us burning,
That is the star in all our night of watching and of yearning.”

Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844–1881) British poet

Music and Moonlight (1874), Barcarolle

Hope, Star, Sun

“On the artist, Charley Patton, who changed him: What happened was I was going out on a Saturday night, so I went into my mam’s bedroom, she’s got a double mirror, really kitsch 50s. So I’m in there, doing that, and she’s got an old alarm clock where the radio comes on, but she never learned how to do it properly. And it came on. […] I remember it was ten past three in the afternoon and it was winter, it was getting dark, and it was when the BBC had just started doing Telstar live things from America. It was some station in Memphis - one of those classic names, ‘RK 51’ or whatever. […] On it came and there’s this record. The satellite thing was a bit cloudy and it was a 78 record and there was compression on the radio, so it was this strange kind of musical blur with this voice coming through: Charley Patton. […] On that night I told the bass player of one of the local bands that I’d heard this record and it sounded weird, it sounded like a violin. He said, ‘No, it’s not a violin, it’s a slide guitar.’ I thought, ‘What’s one of them?”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

2017

Music, Learning, Winter, Change

“Roland the headless Thompson gunner,
Norway's bravest son.
Time, time, time
For another peaceful war.
But time stands still for Roland
'Til he evens up the score.
They can still see his headless body stalking through the night
In the muzzle flash of Roland's Thompson gun;
In the muzzle flash of Roland's Thompson gun.”

Warren Zevon (1947–2003) American singer-songwriter

"Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner", written by Warren Zevon and David Lindell
Excitable Boy (1978)

War, Peace, Time

“The excitement I underwent before the bout was something I’ll never forget. For a week I trained extra hard. I ran extra long distances. Every night when I went to bed I dreamed I was fighting. It was so clear – I would be going at it hot and heavy, then I would bring over a right hand and he would go down, the fight was over. Then the fight began. Here all the nervousness went out of me. I was doing what I wanted to do. It all seemed like something I had done many times before. And you know what? In the third round, just as I dreamed, I hit him with a hard right hand. Down he went and he didn’t get up. I had knocked him out.”

Eder Jofre (1936) Brazilian boxer

Jofre, E. Boxing & Wrestling. Vol 2, No 9. March 1963, Page 17, Why I am the Strongest Little Champ.

Dreams, Time, Fight, Training

“A little work, a little gay
To keep us going—and so good-day!

A little warmth, a little light
Of love’s bestowing—and so, good-night.

A little fun, to match the sorrow
Of each day’s growing—and so, good-morrow!

A little trust that when we die
We reap our sowing—and so—good-bye!”

George du Maurier book Trilby

Trilby (1894). Compare:
:PEU DE CHOSE
La vie est vaine,
Un peu d’amour,
Un peu de haine,
Et puis—Bonjour!

La vie est brève:
Un peu d’espoir,
Un peu de rève
Et puis—Bon soir!
::Léon de Montenaeken; translated by Louise Chandler Moulton as:
:Ah, brief is Life,
Love’s short sweet way,
With dreamings rife,
And then—Good-day!

And Life is vain—
Hope’s vague delight,
Grief’s transient pain,
And then—Good-night.