Quotes about the night
page 38

“Thou whose deep ways are in the sea,
Whose footsteps are not known,
To-night a world that turned from Thee
Is waiting — at Thy Throne.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Dedication, later published as " A Prayer in Time of War http://www.poetseers.org/poets/alfred_noyes/a_prayer_in_time_of_war/" A Belgian Christmas Eve (1915) Context: p>Thou whose deep ways are in the sea, Whose footsteps are not known, To-night a world that turned from Thee Is waiting — at Thy Throne.The towering Babels that we raised Where scoffing sophists brawl, The little Antichrists we praised — The night is on them all.</p

World, Way, Waiting, Sea

“Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word? I shall never forget that memorable night”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)
Context: Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word? I shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city I waited and watched at a public meeting, with three thousand others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance which we have heard read today. Nor shall I ever forget the outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the emancipation proclamation. In that happy hour we forgot all delay, and forgot all tardiness, forgot that the President had bribed the rebels to lay down their arms by a promise to withhold the bolt which would smite the slave-system with destruction; and we were thenceforward willing to allow the President all the latitude of time, phraseology, and every honorable device that statesmanship might require for the achievement of a great and beneficent measure of liberty and progress.

Men, World, Color, Freedom

“The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.”

Upton Sinclair book The Profits of Religion

Book One : The Church of the Conquerors, "The Priestly Lie"
The Profits of Religion (1918)
Context: When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness—that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.

Science, Winter, Time, Summer

“You’re out of the woods
You’re out of the dark
You’re out of the night
Step into the sun, step into the light”

Yip Harburg (1896–1981) American song lyricist

"Optimistic Voices".
Context: You’re out of the woods
You’re out of the dark
You’re out of the night
Step into the sun, step into the light,
Keep straight ahead
For the most glorious place
On the Face of the Earth
Or the sky. Hold onto your breath
Hold onto your heart
Hold onto your hope,
March up to the gate
And bid it open.

Light, Sun

“Yes, there was Edgar, whom I starved and hunted until I was tired of it: then I chased him up a back alley one night, and knocked out those annoying brains of his. And there was Walt, whom I chivvied and battered from place to place, and made a paralytic of him: and him, too, I labelled offensive and lewd and lascivious and indecent. Then later there was Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could not get at him. That was a disgusting trick to play on me, I consider.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

The Judging of Jurgen (1920)
Context: In Philistia to make literature and to make trouble for yourself are synonyms,… the tumblebug explained. — I know, for already we of Philistia have been pestered by three of these makers of literature. Yes, there was Edgar, whom I starved and hunted until I was tired of it: then I chased him up a back alley one night, and knocked out those annoying brains of his. And there was Walt, whom I chivvied and battered from place to place, and made a paralytic of him: and him, too, I labelled offensive and lewd and lascivious and indecent. Then later there was Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could not get at him. That was a disgusting trick to play on me, I consider. Still, these are the only three detected makers of literature that have ever infested Philistia, thanks be to goodness and my vigilance, but for both of which we might have been no more free from makers of literature than are the other countries.…

Literature, Parting, Dead

“Each of us has only this one brief experience with the bright light of consciousness in that endless dark night of eternity and must make the most of it. Doing this means we must respect the existence of everyone else and the most criminal act imaginable is the terminating of one of these conscious existences.”

Harry Harrison The Stainless Steel Rat

The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970)
The Stainless Steel Rat
Context: Cold-blooded killing is just not my thing. I've killed in self-defence, I'll not deny that, but I still maintain an exaggerated respect for life in all forms. Now that we know that the only thing on the other side of the sky is more sky, the idea of an afterlife has finally been slid into the history books alongside the rest of the quaint and forgotten religions. With heaven and hell gone we are faced with the necessity of making a heaven or hell right here. What with societies and metatechnology and allied disciplines we have come a long way and life on the civilised worlds is better than it was during the black days of superstition. But with the improving of here and now comes the stark realisation that here and now is all we have. Each of us has only this one brief experience with the bright light of consciousness in that endless dark night of eternity and must make the most of it. Doing this means we must respect the existence of everyone else and the most criminal act imaginable is the terminating of one of these conscious existences.

Imagination, Light

“But to go to bed every night saying to yourself, 'Man, I'm exhausted, but I did a great day's work' it's the best feeling you can have in this planet.”

Joshua Jackson (1978) Canadian actor

As quoted in the article "Joshing Around" in Movieline magazine (November 1999)
Context: Four years ago, I was working steadily but I felt I was disappointing my family, my friends in not living up to what they expected of me. When The Skulls came along I was drawn to it because it's a morality tale encapsulated in a thriller about a guy caught in a Faustian bargain between doing the right thing and the siren song of 'Just let go of your morality and think of all you can have.' Being Irish, I come from a Celtic tradition of storytellers and this was a story I wanted to help tell. I can honestly say I've never worked harder. But to go to bed every night saying to yourself, 'Man, I'm exhausted, but I did a great day's work' it's the best feeling you can have in this planet.

Feeling

“Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace”

Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) English critic, essayist, poet and writer

Abou Ben Adhem
Context: Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold: Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?" The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord." "And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men." The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!

Peace, Dreams

“I used to say that, as Solicitor General, I made three arguments in every case. First came the one I had planned – as I thought, logical, coherent, complete. Second was the one actually presented – interrupted, incoherent, disjointed, disappointing. The third was the utterly devastating argument that I thought of after going to bed that night…”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

Advocacy Before the Supreme Court: Suggestions for Effective Case Presentations, 37 A.B.A Journal 801 (1951)

Disappointment

“And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:
We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"Sisters of Mercy"
Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
Context: When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon.
Don't turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon.
And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:
We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.

Lovers

“And o'er the hills, and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
Beyond the night, across the day,
Thro' all the world she follow'd him.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Day-Dream

The Departure, st. 4
The Day-Dream (1842)

World

“In a vision of the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as it from Ireland with innumerable letters, and he gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of the letter: "The Voice of the Irish"”

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

The Confession (c. 452?)
Context: In a vision of the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as it from Ireland with innumerable letters, and he gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of the letter: "The Voice of the Irish", and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voice of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea, and the were crying as if with one voice: "'We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us." And I was stung intensely in my heart so that I could read no more, and thus I awoke. Thanks be to God, because after so many ears the Lord bestowed on them according to their cry.

Reading

“"SINN"
We are the anthems, trumpets
long-maned waves and roaring seas
we are the heavy columns of clouds
and eager sharp granite fangs

we are the yellow sands
that marble moon, grey dust
a stone’s shadow as hard as tears
of river streams and famine time

we boundless days, empty nights
blood on the threshold, iris of guns
hangman's ropes and trenches –
of gaping hollow graves”

Marcin Malek (1975) Polish writer

Notes: Originally written in English. „Sinn”: In Gaelic means "We". Poem was created in response to an appeal of fellow Irishman, who ask to wrote something in kind of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's "Ode", maintaining similar styling. (footnote from page 42)

Among the things (2012), Page 42, verse I-III.

Tear, Time, Sea

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safety insane every night of our lives. ”

Уильям Демент (1928)

Dreams

“Night is a stealthy, evil raven, wrapt to the eyes in his black wings.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) American poet, novelist, editor

Evil

“My mother, we were a very poor family. When I was a kid, we would be in our little room, and there would be a knock on the door almost every night with a hobo begging for food. Even though we didn't even have enough to eat, my mother always found something to give them. ”

Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) American stage and film actor

Family, Food

“He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried,
He lived, and when he lost his angel, died.
It happened calmly, on its own.
The way night comes when day is done.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Angels, Way

“No man can be held throughout the day by what happens throughout the night. ”

Салли Стенфорд (1903–1982)

“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

God, Pain, War, People

“I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
one who escapes his tutor's monologues,
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,
his people dying by the balcony;
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite
no longer gets him through a single night;
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;
even the ladies of the court, for whom
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton;
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent
washes to cleanse the poisoned element;
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,
our tyrants' solace in senility,
he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

People, Food, Beauty, Dogs

“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,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Love, Death, Art, Feeling

“I'd rather be a creature of the night than an old dude.”

Джерард Артур Уэй (1977)

“Every night on the court I give my all, and if I'm not giving 100 percent, I criticize myself.”

LeBron James (1984) American basketball player

“Where I grew up - I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights - that's every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don't want your kids to hear growing up.”

LeBron James (1984) American basketball player

“It's the same story, over and over again! The same dependency, the same slugism, that we see mirrored all around us. Hated by the people, we build! Hated by the people we empower! Hated by the people we've given life to! How do you think God feels!?…they they think they're all in competition with me and all this crap. I'm not in competition with any of you people! I'm in competition with the Devil! I'm in a death battle! And now you see the enemy say they'rein a death battle, they know they're in a death battle, only the spirit, of knowing you're in a death battle will have you win! I don't know how all this is gonna end, but like I've told 'em a thousand times, you wanna fight, better believe you got one. You want to enslave my spirit, no! And I'll call on God to protect me, and use me however God sees fit. And if I'm destroyed my whole family with it, I don't blame God. I blame the stinkin' trash. Who will pay. Now. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever. Tormented by their own spirit.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Alex Jones is in a Death Battle" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5lGpU-OnAs, The Alex Jones Show, January 29, 2017. 2017

Family, God, Time, Hate

“Let us turn passing events to our own advantage. Out of conditions as they exist let us carve out fortunes and realize our ambitions. In the beginning nature made man a contending animal. Are we not all Greeks or Trojans? We must therefore make up our minds for a life of continual battle, we must fight, I say, morning, noon and night, if need be against an entire world.”

Arthur Desmond (1859–1929) New Zealnd writer

Rival Caesars (1903)

Nature, Animals, World, Fight

“The Thousand and One Nights, with its magnificent apparatus of genii and afrits, is the greatest work of fantasy that has ever been evolved by tradition, and given literary form. But it, alas, is not English, and has no English equivalent. The Western world does not seem to have conceived the necessity of fairy-tales for grown-ups — though it has been suggested that the modern detective story is an equivalent — and that is perhaps why it condemns them to a life of unremitted toil.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

English Prose Style (1928)
Literary Quotes

World, Life

“Generals who are terribly busy all day and half the night, who fuss round, posting platoons, and writing march tables, wear out not only their subordinates but themselves. Nor have they, when the real emergency comes, the reserve of vigor that will enable them, for days if necessary, to do with little rest or sleep.”

William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim (1891–1970) former Governor-General of Australia

Source: Defeat Into Victory (1961), p. 184

Business, Sleep

“This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.... We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Heston Airport after his return from Munich (30 September 1938), quoted in The Times (1 October 1938) Oxford Book of Modern Quotes http://hudsoncress.org/html/library/dictionaries/The%20Oxford%20Dictionary%20of%20Modern%20Quotations.pdf(pdf) Prime Minister

War, People

“For the present I ask you to await as calmly as you can the events of the next few days. As long as war has not begun, there is always hope that it may be prevented, and you know that I am going to work for peace to the last moment. Good night.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (27 September 1938), quoted in The Times (28 September 1938), p. 10
Prime Minister

War, Peace, Hope

“Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.14

“Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995)

Money

“When I decided to write a novel, I had two full time jobs and three children under the age of six, so I don’t want anyone telling me they don’t have time to write a book, but I learned to work in the middle of the night, and I still do that…”

Diana Gabaldon (1952) American author

On balancing novel writing with her personal life in “Diana Gabaldon on Her ‘Outlander’ Writing Process & Knowing Sam Heughan Was Jamie” https://collider.com/diana-gabaldon-outlander-interview/ in Collider (2018 Aug 2)

Time, Children, Learning, Books

“So look: I really don’t want to shame men for feeling anxious about dating trans women, because I mean I was anxious, too, in the other direction. But I do want to shame men for treating trans women like their dirty little secrets. And I do want to shame men for dehumanizing us and voting away our rights by day, while jerking off to shemale porn by night. I do want to shame men for refusing to date us because they’re not fucking strong enough to shoulder one hundredth of the burden of stigma that every trans women carries every moment of every day. I do want to shame men for attacking their trans girlfriends because they couldn’t stand being treated like a gay man for five minutes. That is pathetic. If you’re so worried about proving you’re a man, why don’t you start by standing up for the women you love, you chickenshit cowards.”

Natalie Wynn ContraPoints

ContraPoints, Feminism Did Not Destroy Atheism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klfH9QaEcqY (2016), "Are Traps Gay?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbBzhqJK3bg (2019)

Strong, Secret, Jerk, Love

“Certain actual sleeping pills cause retrograde amnesia. It can be true that, if I take such a pill, I shall remain awake for an hour, but after my night’s sleep I shall have no memories of the second half of this hour. I have in fact taken such pills, and found out what the results are like. Suppose that I took such a pill nearly an hour ago. The person who wakes up in my bed tomorrow will not be psychologically continuous with me as I was half an hour ago. I am now on psychological branch-line, which will end soon when I fall asleep. During this half-hour, I am psychologically continuous with myself in the past. But I am not now psychologically continuous with myself in the future. I shall never later remember what I do or think or feel during this half-hour. This means that, in some respects, my relation to myself tomorrow is like a relation to another person. Suppose, for instance, that I have been worrying about some practical question. I now see the solution. Since it is clear what I should do, I form a firm intention. In the rest of my life, it would be enough to form this intention. But, when I am no this psychological branch-line, this is not enough. I shall not later remember what I have now decided, and I shall not wake up with the intention that I have now formed. I must therefore communicate with myself tomorrow as if I was communicating with someone else. I must write myself a letter, describing my decision, and my new intention. I must then place this letter where I am bound to notice it tomorrow. I do not in fact have any memories of making such a decision, and writing such a letter. But I did once find such a letter underneath my razor.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), pp. 287-288

Sleep, Question, Past, Future

“I was working at this club in downtown L.A. from four to eight at night, just Eddie Rubin, the drummer, and I. We didn’t even have a bass player down there. Then we’d pack up, get on the freeway, drive up to L.A., go to the Whisky, set up, grab some food, and play from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. It was pretty rough work, but it was fun and we were into it. We knew we had something going and there was a big buzz. It was pretty exciting.”

Johnny Rivers (1942) American musician

Hazen, C. (2001, May 15). Johnny Rivers. Retrieved from https://www.vintageguitar.com/2800/johnny-rivers/.

Food

“I began to think about its double nature: on the one hand you have an organ in your body and on the other you have a symbol of love. From that time I started to pursue the image of a heart crossing the night from one body to another. It is a simple narrative structure but it’s open to a lot of things. I had the intuition that this book could give form to my intimate experience of death.”

Maylis de Kerangal (1967) French writer

On the heart as the focus for her book Mend the Living in “‘What is a heart? You have an organ in your body and you have a symbol of love’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/28/maylis-de-kerangal-interview-wellcome-prize-writing in The Guardian (2017 Apr 28)

Time, Making love, Heart, Nature

“My parents never overtly pushed us to marry Chinese (in fact, my dad was an equal opportunity dater in his time). However, they always encouraged us to value our Chinese-ness. It was never something to be ashamed of. I grew up in a very Chinese American household; Mom cooked Chinese food almost every night, yet she loved her French cooking classes. We all played multiple classical instruments, but were also avid Broadway fans.”

Stacey Lee

On her household’s value on being Chinese American in “AN INTERVIEW WITH STACEY LEE” http://www.bookslut.com/features/2015_07_021234.php in BookSlut (Jul 2015)

Time, Food, Parent, Moms

“I found her charming, went home and thought no more about her. Or, I thought I would think no more about her. But in the following days and nights her image remained obsessively before my eyes. My appetite fell off and I began sleeping badly. My computer checked out the relevant data and told me that I might conceivably be having a nervous breakdown; but the strongest inference was that I was in love.”

Robert Sheckley book The Robot Who Looked Like Me

The Robot Who Looked Like Me (p. 3)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Home, Sleep, Thinking, Love

“It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.”

William Faulkner book Intruder in the Dust

The opening sentence of the novel, Ch. 1
Intruder in the Dust (1948)

“This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares…. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

Delta Autumn (p. 347)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

Time, Wealth, People, Revenge

“Finding this quiet appropriation of my property a little too much, I took the liberty to ask for their return; they gravely replied that my diamond and other jewels were confiscated to the profit of Great Britain I returned sadly to my inn... I resigned myself, however, and slept the most profound sleep. I do not know what passed during the night; but the next morning, when I returned to the Custom House, I found the greatest change in manners and faces. The customs authorities spoke to me in the most respectful tone. They made a million excuses and gave me back my jewel box...”

Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795) Italian occultist

Cagliostro’s Letter to the English People (1787)

Sleep, Housing, Box, Change

“Time was when men of Horse Watson’s profession typically never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horsewhippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had handset into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end—it was simply a fact of life that operated more slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night’s job to their own satisfaction or not.”

Algis Budrys book Michaelmas

Source: Michaelmas (1977), Chapter 3 (pp. 36-37)

Sleep, Time, Housing, Fools

“It’s what I know best. It’s roots. It’s Dazed And Confused and Friday Night Lights. It’s border life and El Pato and Whataburger and getting drunk in a back of a pickup. It’s dancing every weekend to country music, or Tejano music, or club music. It’s the beach. It’s, for better or worse, home.”

Mando Alvarado actor

On how Texas influences his writings in “SIN MUROS: INTERVIEW WITH “LIVING SCULPTURE” PLAYWRIGHT MANDO ALVARADO” https://thetheatretimes.com/sin-muros-interview-living-sculpture-playwright-mando-alvarado/ in The Theatre Times

Home, Country, Light, Music

“This self-analysis is one of the most important magic preliminaries. Many of the occult systems have neglected it, and that is why they did not achieve good results. This psychic preliminary work is indispensable to obtain the magic equilibrium, and without it, there is no regular progress of the development to be thought of. Therefore you ought to devote some minutes’ time to self-criticism in the morning and at night. If you have got the chance of some free moments during the day, avail yourself of them and do some intensive thinking...”

Franz Bardon book Initiation Into Hermetics

Source: Initiation Into Hermetics (1956), p. 36

Chance, Time, Self-confidence, Thinking

“Knowledge is immense and life is short: therefore it is not obligatory to learn all the sciences, such as Astronomy and Medicine, and Arithmetic, etc., but only so much of each as bears upon the religious law: enough astronomy to know the times (of prayer) in the night, enough medicine to abstain from what is injurious, enough arithmetic to understand the division of inheritances and to calculate the duration of the Iddat.”

Ali Hujwiri book Kashf ul Mahjoob

Kashf ul Mahjoob, Chapter I, Affirmation of Knowledge, p. 80
Kashf ul Mahjoob

Time, Law, Understanding, Learning

“That night’s selection was called Windblown Grass. It didn’t exactly smell like grass to Holden, but it was nice. Just a hint of earthiness to it. Holden had a suspicion that all perfumes were named randomly, anyway.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 53 (p. 579)

Grass

“I keep thinking what happens when the power of love is twisted into the love of power. … When he bought our temple we had an eternal light going. Jim asked us to leave it. He wanted to keep it burning as a sign of our friendship and what we stood for. All last night I kept wondering, where did it go out?”

Maurice Davis (1921–1993) American rabbi

On Jim Jones, upon hearing of the mass murders and suicides of Jonestown, as quoted in "Cult Chief's Beginnings in Indianapolis Recalled" by James Feron, The New York Times (22 November 1978); in the early years of Jones' ministries, Davis had sold Jones a synagogue in Indianapolis within which Jones housed his first "People's Temple"; also quoted in "Masters and Slaves: The Tragedy of Jonestown", by Fanita English, M.S.W, in Idea, Vol.1, no.2 (1 September 1996) http://www.ideajournal.com/articles.php?id=7

Friendship, Light, Thinking, Love

“I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth... but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.”

August Kekulé (1829–1896) German organic chemist

Account of his famous dream of the benzene structure, as quoted in A Life of Magic Chemistry : Autobiographical Reflections of a Nobel Prize Winner (2001) by George A. Olah, p. 54

Time, Understanding, Dreams, Learning

“It was an extraordinary display! Daily did this manner of slaughter and plundering proceed. And at night the shrieks of the women captives who were being raped, deafened the ears of the people…All those heads that had been cut off were built into pillars, and the captive men upon whose heads those bloody bundles had been brought in, were made to grind corn, and then their heads too were cut off. These things went on all the way to the city of Agra, nor was any part of the country spared.”

Ahmed Shah Durrani (1722–1772) founder of the Durrani Empire, considered founder of the state of Afghanistan

Tarikh-i-Alamgiri, Kazim 1865, https://books.google.co.in/books?id=lhUwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=Abdali%E2%80%99s+soldiers+would+be+paid+5+Rupees+(a+sizeable+amount+at+the+time)+for+every+enemy+head+brought+in.+Every+horseman+had+loaded+up+all+his+horses+with+the+plundered+property,+and+atop+of+it+rode+the+girl-captives+and+the+slaves.+The+severed+heads+were+tied+up+in+rugs+like+bundles+of+grain+and+placed+on+the+heads+of+the+captives%E2%80%A6Then+the+heads+were+stuck+upon+lances+and+taken+to+the+gate+of+the+chief+minister+for+payment.&source=bl&ots=A22xMHoI9O&sig=ACfU3U3cQpuPeB4cwY8beK1nWw8rvuBaHA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjQ4MzCnY3mAhXaZSsKHcPcBjQQ6AEwAnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Abdali%E2%80%99s%20soldiers%20would%20be%20paid%205%20Rupees%20(a%20sizeable%20amount%20at%20the%20time)%20for%20every%20enemy%20head%20brought%20in.%20Every%20horseman%20had%20loaded%20up%20all%20his%20horses%20with%20the%20plundered%20property%2C%20and%20atop%20of%20it%20rode%20the%20girl-captives%20and%20the%20slaves.%20The%20severed%20heads%20were%20tied%20up%20in%20rugs%20like%20bundles%20of%20grain%20and%20placed%20on%20the%20heads%20of%20the%20captives%E2%80%A6Then%20the%20heads%20were%20stuck%20upon%20lances%20and%20taken%20to%20the%20gate%20of%20the%20chief%20minister%20for%20payment.&f=false

Country, People, Parting, Way

“I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know. The voice in my head keeps reciting these old principles of mine. The voice is his voice, and the voice is also my voice. And there are other voices, voices I have never heard before, voices that seem to be either dead or dying in a great moonlit darkness. More than ever, some sort of new arrangement seems in order, some dramatic and unknown arrangement -- anything to find release from this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Nightmare Factory

Dead, Suffering, Way, Sadness

“Well, say he had ? Would it tear his plane to pieces ? I am quite willing, for anyone who will pay my expenses, to pilot a fighter plane through a Skyhook balloon any time of the day or night and observe the results, without very much fear of hurting myself. But when has a Skyhook ever cruised along at 250 m.p.h., or risen sharply at 400 m.p.h., with orange flames, etc., etc., into the bargain?”

George Adamski (1891–1965) American ufologist

Flying Saucers Have Landed

Hurt, Time, Fear, Tear

“This very night I am going to leave off Tobacco!”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.
Letter to Thomas Manning (December 26, 1815)

“I want more time with Jason. I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights. But that is not going to happen. I probably have only a few days left being a person on this planet.”

Amy Krouse Rosenthal (1965–2017) author, a radio show host and producer, and filmmaker

From her essay [Amy Krouse Rosenthal, You May Want to Marry My Husband, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/style/modern-love-you-may-want-to-marry-my-husband.html, 22 November 2019, The New York Times, March 3, 2017], published 10 days before her death, as quoted in [Stevens, Heidi, Chicago author Amy Krouse Rosenthal's 'You May Want to Marry My Husband' essay went viral. Now her husband is honoring her life with a giant yellow umbrella in Lincoln Park., https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/heidi-stevens/ct-life-stevens-monday-amy-krause-rosenthal-lincoln-park-0513-story.html, 22 November 2019, The Chicago Times]

Personality, Children, Time

“Dismal and fearsome to view was this strong place of Carcë, most like to the embodied soul of dreadful night brooding on the waters of that sluggish river: by day a shadow in broad sunshine, the likeness of pitiless violence sitting in the place of power, darkening the desolation of the mournful fen; by night, a blackness more black than night herself.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Chapter 4, "Conjuring in the Iron Tower"

Strong, Water, Soul

“Last night was a great night for the United States and for the World. A brutal killer, one who has caused so much hardship and death, was violently eliminated – he will never again harm another innocent man, woman or child. He died like a dog. He died like a coward. The world is now a much safer place.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2019, October, Statement on the Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

World, Dogs, Death

“Añez also faces a challenge to her legitimacy in Congress, where lawmakers loyal to Morales tried to hold new sessions that would undermine her claim to the presidency… Morales’ backers, who hold a two-thirds majority in Congress, boycotted the session that she called Tuesday night to formalize her claim to the presidency, preventing a quorum. She claimed power anyway, saying the constitution did not specifically require congressional approval.”

Jeanine Áñez (1967) President of Bolivia

Bolivia caught in a power struggle between Añez at home and Morales in exile https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/bolivia-caught-in-a-power-struggle-between-anez-at-home-and-morales-in-exile, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), (14 November 2019) About

Evo Morales (1959) Bolivian politician

“Today freedom also means the freedom to hate, it means the freedom to say anything, it means the freedom to disparage people, to dehumanize people, to believe in the culture of cruelty, to believe that kindness is not a virtue but a liability. Freedom has been extended into a discourse of violence and hate, which is really part of a larger cultural apparatus that has so undermined the relationship between freedom and justice, freedom and equality, freedom and social responsibility that those terms drop out and freedom becomes in a sense a liability with respect to what a democratic socialist country might look like. The other side of this is that there is a really demonic notion of freedom that seems to suggest we’re all equal and we can all make all of the choices that we want — it’s up to us. In other words, it suggests that choice in this one-dimensional sense of market freedom is defined without constraints. So you are free to sleep under a bridge at night, or you’re free to sleep in the Ritz. Well, that’s just nonsense. It seems to me that choice only becomes meaningful when people have the capacity to make real choices. That’s what freedom really is about in an economic and political sense.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

Sleep, Hate, Justice, Country

“Let me tell all the scum and all the leftists: you’re going to lose all of your jobs soon. The whole mainstream media is dying. We’re going to be in a huge Depression. You’re going to be living in your mothers’ basements. And I hope your little fake liberal culture you’ve got that’s totally fascist and Satanic — I hope it keeps you warm at night because that’s all you’re going to have, and it’s all you’re ever going to have. Okay? I just hope you understand that.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

As quoted in "Alex Jones Melts Globalists over Terror: Mind-Controlled Media Sacrificing the West for Islam" https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/21/alex-jones-melts-globalists-terror-mind-controlled-media-sacrificing-west-islam/ by Rebecca Mansour, Breitbart.com (21 September 2016) ( video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJIB9UAZY-c) 2016

Hope, Understanding

“I’m surrounded by young people, day and night. Thousands of them. The government is afraid of the young, and they won’t touch me because they know I have the power of the young people behind me.”

Nawal El-Saadawi (1931) Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist

On how writers like her are protected by the younger generation since the 2011 revolution in Egypt in “Nawal El Saadawi: ‘Do you feel you are liberated? I feel I am not’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/11/nawal-el-saadawi-interview-do-you-feel-you-are-liberated-not in The Guardian (2015 Oct 11)

People

“To marry a man without loving him, which was what I had just done, not really perceiving it, was a wicked action, I saw. Stiff with remorse and terror, I lay under the thin blanket through a good part of the night; as far as I could tell from what seemed a measureless distance, my untroubled mate was sleeping.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 9, last lines of book

Sleep, Love, Making love, Parting

“If it could be brought about that all the billions of beings who inhabit this sphere would refrain from all acts which would in any way mar the happiness of others, that moment the earth would be transformed. We have thousands of theories as to how to make the world better, and we struggle day and night to understand and control the great natural forces about us; but if we could only get inside of ourselves once and set ourselves to working right, the biggest step toward the Millennium would be taken.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Importance of Ethical Culture, p. 6

Understanding, Nature, Way, World

“I never fucked a 10, but one night I fucked 5 twos!”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Playing With Your Head (1986)

“Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Scottish Liberal Association, Edinburgh, 18 July 1909
Early career years (1898–1929)

Light, Mountain, People, Communication

“For as long as there been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 193

Courage, Search, Sun, Star

“It’s the end of the world. I was excited by the whole situation. Well, if everybody is going to die, die hard, shit, but what do I know? Is this an atomic bomb--the end of the world--the end of the millennium? No more fear of being fired--for typos or tardiness--digressions or recessions--and what a way of being fired--bursting into flames--without two weeks notice--and without six months of unemployment--and without sick leave, vacation, or comp time--without a word of what was to come--on a glorious morning--when nature ran indifferent to the course of man--there came a point when that sunny sky turned into a hellhole of a night—with papers, computers, windows, bricks, bodies falling, and people running and screaming…”

Giannina Braschi book United States of Banana

United States of Banana (2011)

Time, Indifference, People, Nature

“In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life, and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is always moral. The property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with the compensations) in the individual also. How wise the world appears, when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the completeness of the municipal system is considered! Nothing is left out.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Money, God, Time, Law

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836), Ch. 1, Nature

God, Light, Smile, Beauty

“Maybe there are a group of gay banditos… who, every night climb into a van and go from village to dell, from community to community. They wander, and as the sun is coming down, just setting over a suburban village, the gays drive in. And there in a cul-de-sac, there in the light of a house, you can see a young American family, sitting down for their evening meal. And those gays… put on their masks and their festive colored robes, and sneak slowly into the house… and begin to FUCK EACH OTHER IN THE ASS! AND ANOTHER AMERICAN FAMILY IS DESTROYED!”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

The Carnegie Hall Performance (2006)

Family, Housing, Light, Sun

“Adequate health care, housing, education, and clean water and air are increasingly out of reach for large sections of the population, even in wealthy countries in North America and Europe, while transportation is becoming more difficult in the United States and many other countries due to irrationally high levels of dependency on the automobile and disinvestment in public transportation. Urban structures are more and more characterized by gentrification and segregation, with cities becoming the playthings of the well-to-do while marginalized populations are shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are homeless on any given night in the United States.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?, 2019

Housing, Dependency, Country, Children

“Despairingly, sometimes, I seek the comfort of a benign god, Shaarilla. My mind goes out, lying awake at night, searching through black barrenness for something—anything—which will take me to it, warm me, protect me, tell me that there is order in the chaotic tumble of the universe; that it is consistent, this precision of the planets, not simply a brief, bright spark of sanity in an eternity of malevolent anarchy.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Elric sighed and his quiet tones were tinged with hopelessness. “Without some confirmation of the order of things, my only comfort is to accept the anarchy. This way, I can revel in chaos and know, without fear, that we are doomed from the start—that our brief existence is both meaningless and damned. I can accept, then, that we are more than forsaken, because there was never anything there to forsake us. I have weighed the proof, Shaarilla, and must believe that anarchy prevails, in spite of all the laws which seemingly govern our actions, our sorcery, our logic. I see only chaos in the world. If the book we seek tells me otherwise, then I shall gladly believe it. Until then, I will put my trust only in my sword and myself.”
Source: The Elric Cycle, The Weird of the White Wolf (1977), Chapter 1, “A Woman Who Would Risk Grief to Her Soul” (p. 451)

God, Search, Universe, Lying

“Who do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.”

John le Carré (1931) British novelist and spy

Source: The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963), p.231

Sleep, Hate, People, Fools

“When you look at how he reacted to the Charlottesville incident, where neo-Nazis murdered a woman, versus how he manufactures crises like immigrants seeking legal refuge on our borders, it’s—it’s night and day.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

7 January 2019 interview https://twitter.com/MotherJones/status/1082425925470470146 commenting on Donald Trump to Anderson Cooper in 60 Minutes, rebroadcast 23 June 2019 Twitter Quotes (2019), January 2019

“How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets?…How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?”

Smedley D. Butler book War Is a Racket

War is a racket (1935)

War

“I want to solve the issues keeping people up at night with what I call the 3AM Agenda. That means giving Americans a raise, paying women equally for the work they do, making housing affordable, and paying our teachers their value.”

Kamala Harris (1964) United States Senator from California

Source: Twitter post https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris, (27 June 2019)

Housing, People, Teachers, Making love

“Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyesI thought it was there for good so I never triedAnd Jane came by with a lock of your hairShe said that you gave it to herThat night that you planned to go clearDid you ever go clear?”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Famous Blue Raincoat
Songs of Love and Hate (1971)

“A great sense of mission guides us. A great sense of mission guides me. I act day and night in your name, on your behalf, on behalf of our country, on behalf of our people, on behalf of our land!”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

As quoted in, All 3 Major Israeli TV Channels Declare Netanyahu Victor In Election, April 9 2019, The Daily Wire
2010s, 2019

Sense, People, Country

“Neglect not your time, nor use it haphazardly; on the contrary, you should bring yourself to account. Structure your litanies and other practices during each day and night. This is how to bring about spiritual blessing in each period. If each of your breaths is a priceless jewel, be not like the deceived fools who are joyous because of each day their wealth increases while their life grows ever shorter.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

Time, Wealth, Fools, Life

“But today the fashion is to ascribe the extinction of Buddhism to the persecution of Buddhists by Hindus, to the destruction of their temples by the Hindus. One point is that the Marxist historians who have been perpetrating this falsehood have not been able to produce even an iota of evidence to substantiate the concoction. In one typical instance, Romila Thapar had cited three inscriptions. The indefatigable Sita Ram Goel looked them up. Two of these turned out to have absolutely no connection with Buddhist viharas or their destruction, and the one that did deal with an object being destroyed had been held by authorities to have been a concoction; in any event, it told a story which was as different from what the historian had insinuated as day from night.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Fashion

“But she lay long awake that night, nor did she wish for sleep. Her waking fancies were more alluring than any vision of dreamland. Had the real Prince come at last? Recalling those glorious dark eyes which had gazed so deeply into her own, Anne was very strongly inclined to think he had.”

Lucy Maud Montgomery book Anne of the Island

Source: Anne of the Island (1915), Ch. 25

Sleep, Thinking

“He told himself that everything was fine — he only had to look at the sleeping dog on the floor if he doubted — but in the middle of the night it was hard to be an optimist. When the dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of the night thoughts became zombies.”

Stephen King book Under the Dome

Nyuck-Nyuck-Nyuck, 11, p. 286-287 (First Scribner hardcover edition November 2009)
Under the Dome (2009)

Sleep, Bad luck, Dogs

“Profoundly interesting is this world-tragedy of conflict to those who see in it a necessary preparation, a clearing of the ground, for the coming of the World-Teacher and for the new civilisation… The terrible lesson now being taught, the widespread suffering, the devastation by sword and fire, the poverty caused by the dislocation of trade, the tension, the bankruptcies… But through this Armageddon the world will pass into a realm of peace, of brotherhood, of co-operation, and will forget the darkness and the terrors of the night in the joy that cometh in the morning…”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

The Theosophist (October 1914)

Peace, Forgetting, Suffering, Teachers

“First minister, last night you participated in the first major public debate on the future for Wales within the European Union. You went head-to-head with the voice of the far right. Do you think your performance helped or hindered the Welsh campaign on the EU?”

Leanne Wood (1971) Welsh Plaid Cymru politician

UKIP condemns Leanne Wood's 'far right' Farage jibe https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-35292163 BBC News (12 January 2016) 2016

Future, Thinking, Help

“Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar-- the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired. In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another-- was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early); to his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol.4. Part 2.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Daughters, Self-confidence, Literature, Fashion

“Recipe idea: take on fire extinguisher and pour out all the contents. Mix down a nice bright emulsion paint to the consistency of full fat milk, stirring constantly to remove any lumps. Pour into the extinguisher, screw on cap tightly and write on things up to 50 feet high. Re-use by swapping over the CO2 charged canister (costs about one pound). The perfect accompaniment to a night out drinking heavily with friends.”

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

Cut It Out (2004)

Drink, Painting, Perfection, Idea

“I had a good time there. Moby Dick was my nickname. I struck out four times one night, and in the papers they said Ahab got his whale.”

Dick Stuart (1932–2002) American baseball player

On his time—1967 and '68—with the Taiyo Whales; as quoted in "The Summer of 66" by Rick Shrum, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 20, 1998), p. D-3

Time

“Frankie Boyle: Thanks to Phill, Goldie and Miles, Noel, Professor Green and Michelle. This has been a disaster. Good night!”

Frankie Boyle (1972) Scottish comedian

Never Mind The Buzzcocks Series 24 Episode 12

“Gamblers need action, even when the odds suck. And so they return to the ships, night after night—the slot-machine ladies, clutching their plastic cups of quarters; the shouting, hard-drinking craps-table crowd; the roulette addicts, who truly believe, all evidence to the contrary, that there is something lucky about their birthdates; the blackjack loners, with their foolproof systems that don’t work—all of them eager to resume the inexorable process of transferring their cash to whoever owns the ship.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Source: Novels, Tricky Business (2002), Chapter 2

Drink, Relation ships

“And so Butler made a decision, the consequences of which would haunt his dreams and waking hours for years to come. As a professional bodyguard, he knew the futility of second-guessing his own actions, but in the nights ahead he would often sit by the fire, with his head in his hands, and replay the moment in his mind, wishing that he had acted differently. Whatever way he played it out, the results were tragic, but at least they would not have been tragic for Artemis.”

Eoin Colfer book Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony

Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (2006)

Way, Dreams, Decision

“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.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 40 The Martyr

Evil

“The orders are rigorous: you should not neglect your work load. They are to proceed with the building work by night and in the heat of noon. You will not be sleeping during the night or in the heat of noon!”

Shulgi

Correspondence of the Kings of Ur, Letter from Shulgi to Puzur-Shulgi about work on the fortress Igi-hursanga http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section3/tr3108.htm

Sleep

“Out of doors on a moonless night?”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Mette sneered. “Only fools, footpads, and astrologers stray where there is no light.”
Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 4, “Flight” (p. 57)

“I wish I could be near you to hold your hand and explain in some detail the reasons for my death. I know at this point that it has fallen upon you in a way that I wish would not have happened. I wanted to explain to you the night before I left New York that I was really going to Spain, and the reasons why. But I knew that no matter what I might have told you, it would never have made sense to you. I found that trying to explain was an impossibility. I am sorry for that.”

Bill Bailey (Spanish Civil War veteran) (1910–1995) American labor activist

The Kid from Hoboken: An Autobiography by Bill Bailey (1993)

Way, Death, Sense

“Saturday night’s programme at the Wembley Conference Centre combined traditional solo pieces in the pure Lucnowi style, of which Birju Maharaj is the truest representative by both birth and achievement, and genuinely innovative balletsing such as Roopmati-Baz Bahadur.”

Birju Maharaj (1938) Indian dancer

India's Kathak Dance, Past Present, Future

Birth

“For twelve months now, since I first began the practice of law, since I became an attorney, a man who speak for others, a counselor at law who has the power to address the court, that’s right, a big man, a mature person who helps others in distress—for approximately 365 days time has been nothing but a never-ending experience that meets me in the morning just like it left me off the night before. No longer am I the clear-headed mathematician of my college years. I used to have the answers; and if I didn’t, I could always turn to the back of the book or ask Professor Blackburn at Wednesday morning’s advanced algebra class. For a year now, my only conscious concern has been the pain in my stomach, the arguments of Dr. Serbin, and the schedules of the television shows. I know them all by heart. I can quote every single fucking show on Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, and, you won’t believe it, even on the educational station, Channel 9. I am the world’s only living T. V. Guide, that’s really what I am. And they want me to counsel them!”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 24.

Pain, Time, Law, Personality

“Friends, last night I watched the Hollywood (Paramount) movie Noah.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

It is much, much worse than I thought it would be—much worse. The director of the movie, Darren Aronofsky, has been quoted in the media as saying that Noah is “the least biblical biblical film ever made,” and I agree wholeheartedly with him. I am disgusted. I am going to come right out and say it: this movie is disgusting and evil—paganism! Do you really want your family to see a pagan movie that portrays Noah as a psychopath who says that if his daughter-in-law’s baby is a girl then he will kill her as soon as she’s born? And when two girls are born, bloodstained Noah (the man the Bible calls “righteous” in Genesis 7:1) brings a knife down to the head of one of the babies to kill her—and at the last minute doesn’t do it. And then a bit later, Noah says he failed because he didn’t kill the babies. How can we recommend this movie and then speak against abortion? Psychopathic Noah sees humans as a blight on the planet and wants to rid the world of people. I feel dirty—as if I have to somehow wash the evil off myself. I cannot believe there are Christian leaders who have recommended that people see this movie. "The Noah Movie is Disgusting and Evil: Paganism!" http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/03/28/the-noah-movie-is-disgusting-and-evil-paganism/, Around the World with Ken Ham (March 28, 2014) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

“Her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted the birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay, so clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy. After months of paying over $100 out of pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore and had to stop taking it. I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of her final exam period she’d been in the emergency room all night in excruciating pain. … Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

U.S. Congressional testimony (February 23, 2012)

Pain, Birth, Learning

“What made her talent so great was her capacity to live what she sang. Her music was deepened by her connection to the struggles and the triumphs of the African American experience growing up in her father’s church, the community of Detroit, and her awareness of the turmoil of the South. She had a lifelong, unwavering commitment to civil rights and was one of the strongest supporters of the movement. She was our sister and our friend. Whenever I would see her, from time to time, she would always inquire about the well-being of people she met and worked with during the sixties.When she sang, she embodied what we were fighting for, and her music strengthened us. It revived us. When we would be released from jail after a non-violent protest, we might go to a late night club and let the music of Aretha Franklin fill our hearts. She was like a muse whose songs whispered the strength to continue on. Her music gave us a greater sense of determination to never give up or give in, and to keep the faith. She was a wonderful, talented human being. We mourn for Aretha Franklin. We have lost the Queen of Soul.”

Aretha Franklin (1942–2018) American musician, singer, songwriter, and pianist

John Lewis, "Congressman John Lewis on Aretha Franklin: ‘One of God’s precious gifts’" https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/congressman-john-lewis-aretha-franklin-one-god-precious-gifts/PRXHP5dgRpjhhuIUdjGEsO/, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 16, 2018)

Soul, Faith, Time, Support

“John Morrison: Shawn Michaels, Triple H, In life there are winners and there are Losers, and this monday night at Raw we are gonna have two words for you…. (with The Miz) Be Jealous!”

John Hennigan (1979) American professional wrestler

The Dirt Sheet

Life

Quotes about the night page 38

Quotes about the night
page 38