Quotes about the night (3937 quotes, page 5)

“They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night’s magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!”

Thomas Mann book Tristan

Source: Tristan (1902), Ch. 8

Love , Death , Hope

“We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 12

Feeling , Star , Fish , Weather

“Last night we owned, with looks forlorn,
"Too well the scholar knows
There is no rose without a thorn" —
But peace is made! We sing, this morn,
"No thorn without a rose!"
Our Latin lesson is complete:
We've learned that Love is Bitter-Sweet!”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

A Lesson in Latin (1888), st. 3
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

Love , Peace , Learning , Singing

“Business was so bad the other night the orchestra was playing "Tea for One."”

Henny Youngman (1906–1998) American comedian

Don't Put My Name on this Book (1976), p. 92 http://archive.org/stream/dontputmynameont00youn#page/92/mode/2up/search/%22tea+for+one%22

Business , Tea

“Catch a falling star an’ put it in your pocket,
Never let it fade away!
Catch a falling star an’ put it in your pocket,
Save it for a rainy day!
For love may come an' tap you on the shoulder,
Some starless night!”

Paul Vance (1929) American record producer

Song "Catch a Falling Star" (1957)

Love , Star

“I remember, you know, you go to these parties on Saturday night and people would say, about 8:00 on Sunday morning "Whoa, I have to go - I gotta get to church!" People would say, "Why do you want to go to church, all those hypocrites." And I say, "Look, why do I want to stay here with all you hypocrites?"I never knew why going to church made you a hypocrite. They'd say because you go to church and you're all "Holy, Holy, Holy" for two or three hours, and then you go home and sin. I'd say "exactly!" For two or three hours you're doing pretty good! Maybe the problem isn't that you go to church, maybe the problem is that you go home! I never understood why going to church made you a hypocrite either, because nobody goes to church because they're perfect. If you've got it all together, you don't need to go. You can go jogging with all the other perfect people on Sunday morning Every time you go to church, you're confessing again to yourself, to your family, to the people you pass on the way there, to the people who will greet you there, that you don't have it all together. And that you need their support. You need their direction. You need some accountability, you need some help.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Anderson, Indiana http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/anderson-indiana-nov1695.html (November 16, 1995)
In Concert

People , Family , Way , Home

“What I see in the amendment is not an assertion of great principles, which no man honours more than myself. What is at the bottom of it is rather that principle of peace at any price which a certain party in this country upholds. It is that dangerous dogma which I believe animates the ranks before me at this moment, although many of them may be unconscious of it. That deleterious doctrine haunts the people of this country in every form. Sometimes it is a committee; sometimes it is a letter; sometimes it is an amendment to the Address; sometimes it is a proposition to stop the supplies. That doctrine has done more mischief than any I can well recall that have been afloat this century. It has occasioned more wars than the most ruthless conquerors. It has disturbed and nearly destroyed that political equilibrium so necessary to the liberties of nations and the welfare of the world. It has dimmed occasionally for a moment even the majesty of England. And, my lords, to-night you have an opportunity, which I trust you will not lose, of branding these opinions, these deleterious dogmas, with the reprobation of the Peers of England.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech in the House of Lords (10 December 1876), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 1273.

War , People , World , Peace

“Warm summer sun, shine kindly here;
Warm southern wind, blow softly here;
Green sod above, lie light, lie light —
Good-night, dear heart, good-night, good-night.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Epitaph for his daughter, Olivia Susan Clemens (1896), this is actually a slight adaptation of the poem "Annette" by Robert Richardson; more details are available at "The Poem on Susy Clemens' Headstone" http://www.twainquotes.com/headstone.html
Misattributed

Lie , Light , Sun , Heart

“O' my Allah! Sustainer of the high sky and the suspended firmament which Thou hast made a shelter for the night and the day, an orbit for the sun and the moon and a path for the rotating stars, and for populating it Thou hast created a group of Thy angels who do not get weary of worshipping Thee. O' Sustainer of this earth which Thou hast made an abode for people and a place for the movement of insects and beasts and countless other creatures seen and unseen. O' Sustainer of strong mountains which Thou hast made as pegs for the earth and (a means of) support for people. If Thou givest us victory over our enemy, save us from excesses and keep us on the straight path of truth. But if Thou givest them victory over us, then grant us martyrdom and save us from mischief.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

People , Truth , Angels , Mountain

“Why in the world shouldn't they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

In reaction to statements by Maurice O'Connor Drury who expressed disapproval of depictions of an ancient Egyptian god with an erect phallus, in "Conversations with Wittgenstein" as quoted in Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (1997) by Richard Thomas Eldridge, p. 130
Attributed from posthumous publications

Marriage , World , Religion , Sex

“The economic transmission of power without wires is of all-surpassing importance to man. By its means he will gain complete mastery of the air, the sea and the desert. It will enable him to dispense with the necessity of mining, pumping, transporting and burning fuel, and so do away with innumerable causes of sinful waste. By its means, he will obtain at any place and in any desired amount, the energy of remote waterfalls — to drive his machinery, to construct his canals, tunnels and highways, to manufacture the materials of his want, his clothing and food, to heat and light his home — year in, year out, ever and ever, by day and by night. It will make the living glorious sun his obedient, toiling slave. It will bring peace and harmony on earth.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Peace , Food , Home , Light

“When I was a child of ten, I went on my bare knees by my bedside one night and promised God that I should devote my Life to an effort to free my country. I have kept the promise. I have helped to organise, to train, and to discipline my fellow-countrymen to the sole end that, when the time came, they might fight for Irish freedom. The time, as it seemed to me, did come, and we went into the fight. I am glad that we did. We seem to have lost; but we have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on its tradition to the future. I repudiate the assertion of the Prosecutor that I sought to aid and abet England’s enemy. Germany is no more to me than England is. I asked and accepted German aid in the shape of arms and an expeditionary force; we neither asked for nor accepted German gold, nor had any traffic with Germany but what I state. My object was to win Irish freedom. We struck the first blow ourselves, but I should have been glad of an ally’s aid. I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen who value their freedom, and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia. Believe that we too love freedom and desire it. To us it is more than anything else in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again, and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

Patrick Pearse at his court-martial.Publish by the 75th Anniversary Committee, Dublin, 1991.

Love , Life , God , Children

“"Do you think it was a coincidence?"
"Do I think what was a coincidence?"
"That we wound up in Pandemonium the same night that Jace and the others just happened to be there, pursuing a demon? The night before Valentine came for my mother?"
Simon shook his head. "I don't believe in coincidences."
"Neither do I."
"But I have to admit, coincidence or not, it turned out to be a fortuitous occurrence."”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Clary and Simon, pg. 474
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Thinking

“One winter night, at half past nine,
Cold, tired, and cross, and muddy,
I had come home, too late to dine”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Opening lines
Phantasmagoria (1869)

Home , Winter , Past

“It is impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during the night — and thus for one night at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul!”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Black Cat

The Black Cat (1843)

Soul , Imagination , Sense , Appearance

“I'm gonna marry the night.
I won't give up on my life.
I'm a warrior queen,
Live passionately tonight.I'm gonna marry the dark,
Gonna make love to the stark.
I'm a soldier to my own emptiness.
I am a winner.”

Lady Gaga (1986) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Marry the Night, written by Lady Gaga and Fernando Garibay
Song lyrics, Born This Way (2011)

Love , Life , Making love , Passion

“Harry Dresden: There was a sound of impact, a raspy, dry scream, and the vampire went down hard. It lay on the ground like a butterfly pinned to a card, arms and legs thrashing uselessly. Its chest and collarbone had been crushed. By an entire frozen turkey. A twenty-pounder. The plucked bird must have fallen from an airplane overhead, doubtlessly manipulated by the curse. By the time it got to the ground, the turkey had already reached its terminal velocity, and was still hard as a brick. The drumsticks poked up above the vampire's crushed chest, their ends wrapped in red tinfoil. The vampire gasped and writhed a little more. The timer popped out of the turkey. Everyone stopped to blink at that for a second. I mean, come on. Impaled by a guided frozen turkey missile. Even by the standards of the quasi-immortal creatures of the night, that ain't something you see twice. "For my next trick," I panted into the startled silence, "anvils."”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

The Dresden Files, Blood Rites (2004)

Bird , Silence , Time

“It was one of those nights
One of those nights
When you feel the world stop turning
You were standing there
There was music in the air
I should have been away
But I knew I had to stay”

Jeff Lynne (1947) British rock musician

Discovery (1979)

World , Music , Feeling

“In the night all cats are gray.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 33.

Cats

“Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again — a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

"The Distracted Public" (1990), pp. 159-160
It All Adds Up (1994)

Death , School , Music , Sleep

“The blighter that is at the end of the sea
On the pitch-black night raised itself flying;
Round the vessel it flew three times,
Three times it flew creaking,
And said, 'Who dared pierce
Into my dens that I do not reveal,
My black ceilings of the end of the world?'
And the helmsman said, trembling,
'His Majesty King John the Second!'

'Whose sails are these then which I rub against?
Whose the keels I see and hear?'
Said the blighter, and rolled three times,
Three times it rolled filthy and bulky,
'Who attempts what is solely my power,
I who abide where no one ever could see me
And who drip the fears of the depthless sea?'
And the helmsman trembled, and said,
'His Majesty King John the Second!'

Three times he raised his hands from the helm,
Three times he had them rooted on the helm,
And said after trembling three times,
'Here at the helm I am more than myself:
I am a People who wants the sea that is yours;
And more than the blighter, that my soul fears
And rolls on the darkness of the end of the world,
Orders the will, that ties me at the helm,
Of His Majesty King John the Second!'”

Fernando Pessoa book Mensagem

Poem "O Mostrengo" http://www.inverso.pt/Mensagem/MarPortugues/mostrengo.htm, lines 1–9, trans. Charles Eglington ( Listen to the poem on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5Ihd-ECpYM)
Message

People , World , Fear , Soul

“His Imperial and Royal Majesty entered his palace at the Tuileries last night in the midst of his faithful subjects.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Le Moniteur Universel, March 22, 1815.
About

Faith

“To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a thing was worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Whisperer in Darkness (1931)

Life , Secret , Law , Soul

“I have not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but hold the matter under advisement. And I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be God's will I will do. I trust that in the freedom with which I have canvassed your views I have not in any respect injured your feelings.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Reply to an Emancipation Memorial (1862)

God , Feeling , Freedom , Appearance

“If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
On this winters night with you”

Gordon Lightfoot (1938) Canadian singer-songwriter

Song For A Winter's Night, Track 10, United Artists A hauntingly beautiful version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbgfXp5M02M
The Way I Feel (1967)

Love , Winter , Happiness

“The murderer smiles palely in wine,
Death's horror grips the sick.
Excoriated and naked, the nun prays
Before the Savior's agony on the cross.

The mother sings quietly in sleep.
Peacefully the child looks into the night
With eyes that are completely truthful.
In the whorehouse laughter rings.

By candlelight down in the cellar hole
The dead one paints with white hand
A grinning silence on the wall.
The sleeper whispers still.”

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) austrian poet

"Romance in the Night"

Death , Truth , Smile , Laughter

“I’ve seen my characters morphed into PC cyphers. But the thing is once I’m done working on them, it’s like watching your kids go off with another guy. The new daddy is here, I just don’t pay attention to it otherwise I’d be crying myself to sleep every night, so I just walk away from it and go on to new work, move forward.”

Chuck Dixon (1954) American comic book writer

Chuck Dixon On The Milo Show: ‘My Characters Have Been Morphed Into PC Cyphers’ http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/08/04/chuck-dixon-milo-yiannopoulos-show/ (August 24, 2016)

Guy , Sleep , Cry

“I have a saying. 'Never judge a book by its cover'. I say that because I don't even know who Ozzy is. I wake up a new person every day. But if you've got a fantasy of Ozzy, who am I to say? I mean, if you think I sleep upside-down in the rafters and fly around at night and bite people's throats out, then that's your thing. But I can tell you now, all I ever wanted was for people to come to my concerts and have a good time. I don't want anyone to harm themselves in any way, shape or form-and my intentions are good whether people want to believe it or not. I'm not going to suddenly become a Jesus freak or anything. But I do have my beliefs and my beliefs are certainly not satanic.”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

Rolling Stone Online, May 1997.

People , Books , Way , Thinking

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young — alas, she never wrote a word… Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 6, p. 117)

Life , Women , Children , Sister

“The distribution of tasks among the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means that the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas the senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 2

Parting

“[I've changed a bit here - see youtube video "Jordan Peterson - Are YOU Antisocial?!"] We have these shared frames of reference, like when we're playing monopoly. Children at three learn to play games, which means that they learn to organize their own internal motivational states into a hierarchy that includes the emotional states of other people. And that means they can play. And that's what everyone does when they're out in the world. That's why we can go about our daily business - we all know the rules. That's why we can sit in the same room without fighting each other. Because you're smart and socially conscious, you can walk into a room full of people and know what to do. If you're civilized and social you can just do it, and you can predict what all the other primates are up to, and they won't kill you. That's what it means to be part of the same tribe. People are very peculiar creatures and God only knows what they're up to. As long as they're playing the same game that you are, you don't have to know what they're up to, and you can predict what they're going to do because you understand their motivational states. And so, part of the building and constructing of higher order moral goals is the establishment of joint frames of reference that allow multiple people to pursue the goals that they're interested in simultaneously. Not all shared frames of reference can manage that. There's a small subset of them that are optimized so that not only can multiple people play them, but multiple people can play them, AND enjoy them, AND do it repeatedly across a long period of time. So it's iterability that partly defines the utility of a higher order moral structure, and that is not arbitrary. It's an emergent property of biological interactions. It's not arbitrary at all, because a lot of what's constraining your games is your motivational substructure and those ancient circuits that are status oriented, which operate within virtually every animal. Virtually every animal has a status counter. Creatures organize themselves into dominance hierarchies. The reason they do that is because that works. It's a solution to the Darwinian problem of existence. It's not just an epiphenomena. It's the real thing. So your environment is fundamentally dominance hierarchy, plus God only knows where you are. And that's order and chaos. And part of the reason people fight to preserve their dominance hierarchies is because it's better to be a slave who knows what the hell is going on than someone who is thrown screaming and naked into the jungle at night. And that's the difference between order and chaos. And we like order better than chaos and it's no wonder. And invite a little chaos in for entertainment now and then, but it has to be done voluntarily, and generally you don't want the kind of chaos that upsets your entire conceptual structure. You're willing to fool around on the fringes a little bit, but you know, when the going gets serious you're pretty much likely to bail out.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

God , Children , People , World

“Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Entre le joueur du matin et le joueur du soir il existe la différence qui distingue le mari nonchalant de l'amant pâmé sous les fenêtres de sa belle.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), Part I: The Talisman

Lovers

“Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me — the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture's power to construct our days and nights.”

Barbara Kruger (1945) American artist

Source: Art in America, Vol. 85, Nr. 10-12 (1997), p. 96

Love , Pleasure

“Whatever flames upon the night
Man’s own resinous heart has fed.”

W.B. Yeats book The Tower

II, st. 2
The Tower (1928), Two Songs From a Play http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1741/

Heart

“And she arose, and in that darkening room
Stood lonely as a spirit of the night —
Stood calm and fearless in the gathered night —
And raised her eyes to heaven. There were tears
Upon her face, but in her heart was peace.
Peace that the world nor gives nor takes away!”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

The Path of Roses (1856), concluding lines
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

World , Peace , Tear , Heart

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1934)

Dreams , Soul

“And over the village slipped the days, passing into the nights; the weeks flowed by, the months crept on, the wind howled, and, glassified with an autumnal, translucent, greenish-azure, the Don flowed tranquilly down to the sea.”

Mikhail Sholokhov book And Quiet Flows the Don

And Quiet Flows the Don (1934)

Autumn , Sea

“Among all the luminaries shining in the sky, the sun is the chief, and in the Brahma-samhita the sun is accepted as the glowing eye of the Supreme Lord. There are fifty varieties of wind blowing in space, and of these winds the controlling deity, Marici, represents Krishna. Among the stars, the Moon is the most prominent at night, and thus the Moon represents Krishna. It appears from this verse that the Moon is one of the stars; therefore the stars that twinkle in the sky also reflect the light of the sun. The theory that there are many suns within the universe is not accepted by Vedic literature. The sun is one, and as by the reflection of the sun the Moon illuminates, so also do the stars. Since Bhagavad-gita indicates herein that the Moon is one of the stars, the twinkling stars are not suns but are similar to the Moon.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1972. Chapter 10, verse 21, purport. Vedabase http://www.vedabase.com/en/bg/10/21
Quotes from Books: Loving God, Quotes from Books: Regression of Science

Star , Literature , Light , Universe

“The pictures, with their ruddy light,
Are changed to dust and ashes white,
And I am left alone with night.”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

Faces in the Fire (1860), st. 13
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

Light , Change

“Those are the victories they won, with iron wills and hope in their hearts. That is the transformation that they wrought, with each step of their well-worn shoes. That’s the debt that I and millions of Americans owe those maids, those laborers, those porters, those secretaries; folks who could have run a company maybe if they had ever had a chance; those white students who put themselves in harm’s way, even though they didn't have; those Japanese Americans who recalled their own internment; those Jewish Americans who had survived the Holocaust; people who could have given up and given in, but kept on keeping on, knowing that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.””

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)

People , Hope , Shoe , Way

“In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

Dark Night of the Soul

Secret , Light , Heart , Happiness

“Fly not yet; 't is just the hour
When pleasure, like the midnight flower
That scorns the eye of vulgar light,
Begins to bloom for sons of night
And maids who love the moon.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Fly not yet.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love , Pleasure , Flowers , Light

“The usual devastating put-downs imply that a person is basically bad, rather than that he is a person who sometimes does bad things. Obviously, there is a vast difference between a "bad" person and a person who does something bad.
Besides, failure is an event, it is not a person — yesterday ended last night.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

See You at the Top (2000)
Variant: Failure is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night.

Failure , Personality

“Night's darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

213
Stray Birds (1916)

“I have not invented anything, only the night I have sensed, and in it the new which I called Suprematism.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Quoted in Dokumente zum Verständnis der modernen Malerei, Walter Hess, (Hamburg, 1956), p. 98
1921 - 1930

Sense

“No, I happen to be one of those people whose memory shuts down under pressure. The answers would come to me in the middle of the night in my sleep! Besides, I am a millionaire.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Response to a question asking if he would appear on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. ALCS News http://www.alcs.co.uk/News%20Events/ALCS%20News/News%20Stories/TerryPratchettInterview.aspx?template=/printerfriendly/alcs-newspf.aspx (May 2006)
General sources

People , Sleep , Memory

“If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.”

Galileo Galilei book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

Salviati, p. 88
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)

“Virtue is not a mushroom, that springeth up of itself in one night when we are asleep, or regard it not; but a delicate plant, that groweth slowly and tenderly, needing much pains to cultivate it, much care to guard it, much time to mature it, in our untoward soil, in this world's unkindly weather.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

As quoted in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 612

Pain , World , Time , Weather

“"Maybe you should try looking a little less smug about what you did last night."
"I do not look smug. Well, no more than usual."
"Please, I can read your face like a very open, very pornographic book. I wish I couldn't."”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Alec Lightwood and Jace Heronale, pg. 535
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

Books , Reading

“Hear the mellow wedding bells
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Bells

"The Bells", st. 2 (1849).

World , Wedding , Happiness

“We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Televised speech (27 October 1964), cited in Reagan's Reign of Error (1983) by Mark Green
1960s

People

“Thank you, Poland -- thank you for your courage. Thank you for reminding the world that no matter how brutal the crackdown, no matter how long the night, the yearning for liberty and dignity does not fade away. It will never go away. Thank you, Poland, for your iron will and for showing that, yes, ordinary citizens can grab the reins of history, and that freedom will prevail -- because, in the end, tanks and troops are no match for the force of our ideals.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, 25th Anniversary of Polish Freedom Day Speech (June 2014)

World , History , Courage , Freedom

“I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

On the Heights of Despair (1934)

Mood , Madness , Happiness

“The field Negro was beaten from morning to night; he lived in a shack, in a hut; he wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master, but that field Negro — remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn't try to put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he'd die. If someone came to the field Negro and said, "Let's separate, let's run," he didn't say, "Where we going?"”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

He'd say, "Any place is better than here."
Speech (9 November 1963). p. 11.
Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

Love , Hate , Intelligence , Housing

“In this winter night, long and ample for bitter memories, many a widow who lost her husband in the war and is now left alone will press her palms to her ageing face; and in the nocturnal darkness the burning tears, as bitter as wormwood, will scorch her fingers.”

Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984) Soviet writer

From A Word on Our Country.
One Man's Destiny (1967)

War , Age , Tear , Memory

“The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?””

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?.
Sec. 341
The Gay Science (1882)

Life , God , Pain , Lie

“A change came o'er my Vision - it was night:
We clove a pathway through a frantic throng:
The steeds, wild-plunging, filled us with affright:
The chariots whirled along.

Within a marble hall a river ran -
A living tide, half muslin and half cloth:
And here one mourned a broken wreath or fan,
Yet swallowed down her wrath”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Four Riddles, no. I
Rhyme? and Reason? (1883)

Change , Clothes

“The cold winds sweeping the mountain-height,
And pathless was the dreary wild,
And ’mid the cheerless hours of night
A mother wandered with her child:
As through the drifting snows she press’d,
The babe was sleeping on her breast.”

Seba Smith (1792–1868) American humorist

The Snow Storm.

Mountain , Sleep

“Love is a vision, a firefly that majestically glows in the night for some time; then, it winks at you and swiftly disappears.”

Vinko Vrbanić (1951)

Love

Love , Time

“One night I was walking on the street by a commercial area close to my neighborhood. I passed by a big garbage container. and I stopped, then with an oil stick bar I wrote, “I am CLANDESTINE CULTURE. Welcome to my World.” I didn't know why I did it, but I did it and it worked. I was feeling better after that. I released all my anger and all my frustration in just one phrase: CLANDESTINE CULTURE.”

Clandestine Culture (1970) American artist

http://artdistricts.com/clandestine-culture-between-street-art-and-social-activism/

World , Feeling , Anger

“I find that any luminous body when seen through a dense and thick mist diminishes in proportion to its distance from the eye. Thus it is with the sun by day, as well as the moon and the other eternal lights by night. And when the air is clear, these luminaries appear larger in proportion as they are farther from the eye.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IV Perspective of Disappearance

Light , Appearance , Sun

“Billy Budd: You didn't even hate him. I think that sometimes you hate yourself. I was thinking, sir, the nights are lonely. Perhaps I could talk with you between watches when you've nothing else to do.
Claggert: Lonely. What do you know of loneliness?
Billy Budd: Them's alone that want to be.
Claggert: Nights are long. Conversation helps pass the time.
Billy Budd: Can I talk to you again, then? It would mean a lot to me.
Claggert: Perhaps to me, too. [His expression suddenly sours] Oh, no. You would charm me too, huh? Get away.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

Billy Budd (1962)

Hate , Thinking , Time , Help

“I feel that if I am busting my arse, if I am stretching at night, if I am working hard in the gym, if I am doing all of my extras out on the field, if I am the first one there and the last to leave or whatever, and if I am giving my all every game, then I deserve to be the man I want to be rather than the man other people want me to be.”

Sonny Bill Williams (1985) New Zealand rugby player and heavyweight boxer

Williams on the controversial nature of his flitting between football codes. Sonny Bill Williams regrets nothing http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-league/league-news/sonny-bill-williams-regrets-nothing-20131129-2yfvd.html, by Brad Walter, Sydney Morning Herald, dated 29 November 2013.

People , Feeling , Game

“The breathing of the air,
The song of the sweet nightingale,
The grove and its beauty
In the serene night,
With the flame that consumes, and gives no pains. ~ 39”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom

Pain , Beauty

“Hale: Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits — your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now — we shall find him out if he has come among us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!
Rebecca: Will it hurt the child, sir?
Hale: I cannot tell. If she is truly in the Devil's grip we may have to rip and tear to get her free.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

The Crucible (1953)

Books , World , Fear , Tear

“Nature too remains, so far as we have yet come, ever a frightful Machine of Death: everywhere monstrous revolution, inexplicable vortices of movement; a kingdom of Devouring, of the maddest tyranny; a baleful Immense: the few light-points disclose but a so much the more appalling Night, and terrors of all sorts must palsy every observer.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Pupils at Sais (1799)

Death , Nature , Light

“I usually have to be home by 10 o'clock and my mom takes my computer away at 10.30pm every night.”

Justin Bieber (1994) Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor

Quoted in Stv entertainment "Justin Bieber's strict mother" http://entertainment.stv.tv/showbiz/176908-justin-biebers-strict-mother/, May 2010

Home , Moms

“Those in positions of power spend day and night plotting and pondering about what to do. The body is treated in a very careless way. People live their lives, constantly surrounded by anxiety. If they live long before dying, they end up in senility, worn out by concerns: a terrible fate.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Ch. 18 (Martin Palmer/Elizabeth Breuily, Penguin Publishing 1996)

Fate , People , Way

“As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.”

Friedrich Schiller book On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Letter 9
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Truth , Art , Imagination , Fashion

“In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Other Gods (1921)

God , Travel

“I celebrated my 21st birthday here, and that was the last time I drank in El Paso. [Audience cheers] You folks don't mess around, you know? Everyone was going, "It's your birthday," I was like, "It's my birthday!" "Do you want a drink?" "SUUURRREE!" And I kept drinking and drinking and drinking, and then the staff asked me, "Do you want to party?" I was like, [Slurring]"I want to party." "Do you want to dance?" [Slurring] "I wanna dance!" I passed out, you guys, and woke up at a place called the O. P. [Audience laughs and cheers] Yeah, the reason you people in El Paso are laughing is because you KNOW! I had no idea it was an "Alternative" night club. I'm from L. A., I thought O. P. stood for: Orale pues! That is a bad way to sober up, you guys. I'm just dancing, you know [Imitates beat-box music] Boom, boom, boom, hey! Boom, boom, boom, hey! Boom, boom, boom- [Jumps like something's behind him] HEY! [Audience laughs] And behind me was this little guy going, [Little effeminate voice] "Pikachu!"”

Gabriel Iglesias (1976) American actor

I'm Not Fat, I'm Fluffy (2009)

People , Music , Way , Guy

“Last night Alexis got his script for Angel. I was like, "Oh, I would have been getting a Buffy script right now."”

Alyson Hannigan (1974) American actress

About.com, "American Wedding's" Bride and Groom Discuss the Third "Pie" Movie http://movies.about.com/cs/americanwedding/a/amwedjbah.htm.

Angels

“15. As in the night when the sun is not present, one sees the light in the moon, the man who is not present in the heart, sees merely the mind.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

The Science of the Heart

Light , Sun , Heart

“Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon.”

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) English poet and fiction writer

Silver.

“The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

Life , Pain , Hope

“After this the good Lord shewed the Sixteenth on the night following, as I shall tell after: which Sixteenth was conclusion and confirmation to all Fifteen.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Fifteenth Revelation, Chapter 66

“I just felt baseball was a beautiful game, especially at night. The sun -- I mean, you had the lights out there and all you do is go out there, and you're out there by yourself in center field, and it's just a beautiful game. And, I just felt that it was such a beautiful game that I just wanted to play it forever, you know.”

Willie Mays (1931) Baseball player

Academy of Achievement Interview (1996)

Beauty , Game , Light , Sun

“My husband plunged into work on a speech and I went off to work on an article. Midnight came and bed for all, and all that was said was "good night, sleep well, pleasant dreams, with the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.'”

Eleanor Roosevelt My Day

from "My Day" (January 8, 1936)
Source: https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1936&_f=md054227 Eleanor Roosevelt, "My Day, January 8, 1936," The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2017), accessed 7/24/2018, https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1936&_f=md054227.

Dreams , Sleep

“The ocean ate the last of the land and poured into the smoking gulf, thereby giving up all it had ever conquered. From the new-flooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death and decay; and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely, uncovering nighted secrets of the years when Time was young and the gods unborn. Above the waves rose weedy remembered spires. The moon laid pale lilies of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with star-dust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered; terrible spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands…”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Crawling Chaos (1921)

Death , Men , God , Secret

“There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Written on the Body (1992)

Dreams , Thinking , Heart

“Much like postal service, demon hunters never sleep. 'Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these-'"
"You'd be in major trouble if gloom of night did stay you.”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Jace and Clary, pg. 306
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Sleep

“She cries alone at night too often
He smokes and drinks and don't come home at all.
Only women bleed…”

Alice Cooper (1948) American rock singer, songwriter and musician

"Only Women Bleed" (co-written with Dick Wagner) - Lyrics online http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=3929.
Welcome to My Nightmare (1975)
Context: Man's got his woman to take his seed
He's got the power — oh
She's got the need
She spends her life through pleasing up her man
She feeds him dinner or anything she can.
She cries alone at night too often
He smokes and drinks and don't come home at all.
Only women bleed...

Women , Home , Drink

“As they have dared, so shall I dare. Dare to tell the truth, as I have pledged to tell it, in full, since the normal channels of justice have failed to do so. My duty is to speak out; I do not wish to be an accomplice in this travesty. My nights would otherwise be haunted by the spectre of the innocent man, far away, suffering the most horrible of tortures for a crime he did not commit.”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)
Context: A court martial, under orders, has just dared to acquit a certain Esterhazy, a supreme insult to all truth and justice. And now the image of France is sullied by this filth, and history shall record that it was under your presidency that this crime against society was committed.
As they have dared, so shall I dare. Dare to tell the truth, as I have pledged to tell it, in full, since the normal channels of justice have failed to do so. My duty is to speak out; I do not wish to be an accomplice in this travesty. My nights would otherwise be haunted by the spectre of the innocent man, far away, suffering the most horrible of tortures for a crime he did not commit.

Truth , Justice , Suffering

“The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator

Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. I : The Craft
Context: I had a vision of the face of destiny.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.

World , Star , Reading

“Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.”

Heraclitus (-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

Fragment 26
Numbered fragments

Light

“O'er Nature's laws, God cast the veil of night,
Out blaz'd a Newton's soul — and all was light.”

Aaron Hill (writer) (1685–1750) British writer

Preserved in Hill's Works (1753), Vol. IV, p. 92, and mentioned as probably derived from Alexander Pope's "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! — and all was light" in The Epigrammatists: A Selection from the Epigrammatic Literature of Ancient, Mediæval, and Modern Times (1875) by Henry Philip Dodd, p. 329.

God , Law , Soul , Nature

“God was not to him the impassive Creator, a Nero from his tower of brass watching the burning of the City to which he himself has set fire. God was fighting. God was suffering. Fighting and suffering with all who fight and for all who suffer. For God was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, spreading out, reaching out, drinking up the night.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

Jean-Christophe (1904 - 1912), Journey's End: The Burning Bush (1911)
Context: God was not to him the impassive Creator, a Nero from his tower of brass watching the burning of the City to which he himself has set fire. God was fighting. God was suffering. Fighting and suffering with all who fight and for all who suffer. For God was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, spreading out, reaching out, drinking up the night. But the night is limitless, and the Divine struggle will never cease: and none can know how it will end. It was a heroic symphony wherein the very discords clashed together and mingled and grew into a serene whole! Just as the beech-forest in silence furiously wages war, so Life carries war into the eternal peace.
The wars and the peace rang echoing through Christophe. He was like a shell wherein the ocean roars. Epic shouts passed, and trumpet calls, and tempestuous sounds borne upon sovereign rhythms. For in that sonorous soul everything took shape in sound. It sang of light. It sang of darkness, sang of life and death. It sang for those who were victorious in battle. It sang for himself who was conquered and laid low. It sang. All was song. It was nothing but song.

Life , God , Drink , Light

“I take up my brush to explain the true spirit of this Ichi school as it is mirrored in the Way of heaven and Kwannon. The time is the night of the tenth day of the tenth month, at the hour of the tiger.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), Introduction
Context: When I reached thirty I looked back on my past. The previous victories were not due to my having mastered strategy. Perhaps it was natural ability, or the order of heaven, or that other schools' strategy was inferior. After that I studied morning and evening searching for the principle, and came to realise the Way of strategy when I was fifty.
Since then I have lived without following any particular Way. Thus with the virtue of strategy I practise many arts and abilities — all things with no teacher. To write this book I did not use the law of Buddha or the teachings of Confucius, neither old war chronicles nor books on martial tactics. I take up my brush to explain the true spirit of this Ichi school as it is mirrored in the Way of heaven and Kwannon. The time is the night of the tenth day of the tenth month, at the hour of the tiger.

School , Way , Time

“We are in a great night of the world.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light
Context: We are in a great night of the world. The thing is to know if we shall wake up to-morrow. We have only one succor — we know of what the night is made. But shall we be able to impart our lucid faith, seeing that the heralds of warning are everywhere few, and that the greatest victims hate the only ideal which is not one, and call it utopian?

World

“My Beloved is the mountains,
The solitary wooded valleys,
The strange islands,
The roaring torrents,
The whisper of the amorous gales;
The tranquil night
At the approaches of the dawn,
The silent music,
The murmuring solitude,
The supper which revives, and enkindles love. ~ 14 & 15”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom

Love , Music , Mountain , Solitude

“On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead" . . . the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man . . . it had been a one-night jag . . . he was married and had children . . . and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

On her near-death experience and final days in New York
Edie : American Girl (1982)
Context: "The Siege of the Warwick Hotel." I was left alone with a substantial supply of speed. I started having strange, convulsive behavior. I was shooting up every half-hour... thinking that with each fresh shot I'd knock this nonsense out of my system. I'd entertain myself hanging on to the bathroom sink with my hind feet stopped up against the door, trying to hold myself steady enough so I wouldn't crack my stupid skull open. I entertained myself by making a tape... a really fabulous tape in which I made up five different personalities. I realized that I had to get barbiturates in order to stop the convulsions, which lasted either hours. Something was spinning in my head.... I just kept thinking that if I could pop enough speed I'd knock the daylights out of my system and none of this nonsense would go on. None of this flailing around and moaning, sweating like a pig, and whew! It was a heavy scene. When I finally cooled down to what I thought was pretty good shape, I slipped on a little muumuu, ran down the stairs of the Warwick, barefoot to the lobby. My eye caught a mailman's jacket and a sack of mail hanging across the back of a chair in the hall way entrance, and before I knew what I was doing, I whipped on the jacket, flipped the bag over my shoulder, and flew out the door, whistling a happy tune. Suddenly I thought: "My God! This is a federal offense. Fooling around with the mail." So I turned around and rushed back and BAM! the manager was waiting for me. He ordered me into the back office. They telephoned an ambulance from Bellevue and packed me into it. Five policemen. I was back into convulsions again, which was really a drag, and I tried to tell the doctors and the nurses and the student interns that I'd run out of barbiturates and overshot speed.... I could speak sanely, but all my motor nerves were going crazy wild. It looked like I was out of my mind. If you had seen me, you wouldn't have bothered to listen, and none of them did. Oh, God, it was a nightmare. Finally six big spade attendants came and held me down on a stretcher. They terrified me... their force against mine. I got twice as bad. I just flipped. I told them if they'd just let go of me, I would calm down and stop kicking and fighting. But they wouldn't listen and they started to tell each other what stages of hallucinations I was in... how I imagined myself an animal. All these things totally unreal to my mind and just guessed on their part. Oh, it was insane. Then they plunged a great needle into my butt and BAM! out I went for two whole days. When I woke up, wow! Rats all over the floor, wailing and screaming. We ate potatoes with spoons. The doctors at Bellevue finally contacted my private physician, and after five days he came and got me out. They sent me back to Gracie Square, a private mental hospital that cost a thousand dollars a week. I was there for five months. Then I ran away with a patient and we went to an apartment in the Seventies somewhere which belonged to another patient in the hospital, who gave us the keys. The guy I ran away with was twenty, but he'd been a junkie since the age of nine, so he was pretty emotionally retarded and something of a drag. I didn't have any pills, so, kind of ravaging around, I went to see a gynecologist and a pretty well-off one. He asked me if I would like to shoot up some acid with him. I hadn't much experience with acid, but I wasn't afraid. He closed his office at five, and we took off in his Aston Martin and drove up the coast... no, what's the name of that river? The Hudson. We stopped at a motel and he gave me three ampules of liquid Sandoz acid, intravenously, mainlining, and he gave himself the same amount and he completely flipped, I was hallucinating and trying to tell him what I was seeing. I'd say, "I see rich, embroidered curtains, and I see people moving in the background. It's the Middle Ages and I am a princess, " and I told him he was some sort of royalty. We made love from eight in the evening until seven in the morning with ecstatic climax after climax, just going insane with it, until he realized it was seven and he had to get back to his office to open it at eight-thirty. He gave me a shot to calm me down, and because I couldn't come down, I took about fourteen Placidyls. On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead"... the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man... it had been a one-night jag... he was married and had children... and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone. He dropped me off at the apartment where I was staying with the runaway patient. I had a little Bloody Mary when I got there, and dropped a few more Placidyls. With my tolerance, nothing should have happened, but I suddenly went into a coma. My eyes rolled back in my head. It was lucky... I had called an aide, Jimmy, at the hospital - he had been a good friend - I had called him anonymously and asked him to come and visit us. He happened to turn up just as I went into the coma. He and the heroin addict tried to wake me up. They slapped me and pumped my chest and they put me in a bathtub full of really cold water. Jimmy began to call hospitals - not psychiatric but medical - and one of them actually told them to let me sleep it off. But Jimmy just flipped. He knew I was dying, and he was right. He called Lenox Hill Hospital, and the police finally came. Jimmy and the heroin addict were taken into custody, and I was rushed to the hospital. I was actually declared dead. My mother was called... and then BAM! I started breathing again. I was pretty shaken up by what happened because I didn't understand how I could have almost gone out on just fifteen Placidyls when I used to live on thirty-five three-grain Tunials a day, plus alcohol. They released Jimmy and the junkie, but of course I was still in the trap. I thought I was fine and that I could leave. But a psychiatrist came to interview me and I was put in the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital - committed on the grounds of unintentional, unconscious suicide. It was a pretty devastating experience. They put me on eight hundred milligrams of Thorazine four times a day plus six hundred milligrams at bedtime - an ugly-tasting liquid, but it took quick effect and you couldn't hide the pills or spit them out later. I had all kinds of bad reactions from it - I'd get bad tremors and all itchy and wormy. I said I wasn't going to take the stuff any more, no matter what, so they finally took me off it one day. I had a seizure, vomited all over the floor, and I couldn't get tremendous dosages of Thorazine, but they accused me of importing drugs and taking them there in the hospital. My doctor was young... a resident... and I just told him, "You think I've taken drugs. There's no point in even reasoning with you. I'll just go to some other hospital." I expected to go to some plush, tolerable hospital, but I was not accepted in any private hospital with the record they gave me. They committed me to Manhattan State on Ward's Island, in the middle of the East River, next to the prison. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever been through. Really terrifying. I lived in a big dormitory on a ward with about sixty to eighty women. We did all the mopping, cleaning, making beds, scrubbing toilets. And the people there were just so awful. Really pathetic. Some of them were mean. The staff completely ignored you except to administer medication. I thought it was never going to end. In Manhattan State, even in there, there were pushers. One girl who lived in a smaller dormitory - there were two with about ten beds in them - was pushing speed and heroin. And because I'd been warned that if ever you were caught using drugs in a state hospital you'd be criminally punished, I didn't touch any drugs during the three months I was there.

Love , Children , Beauty , Way

“You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Context: How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home? Lady Li was the child of a border guard in Ai. When first captured by the state of Jin, she wept so much her clothes were soaked. But after she entered the palace, shared the king's bed, and dined on the finest meats, she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.

Dreams

“Fading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets that numb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will, and the heavenward gaze of faith — the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen!
"Look Eastward! Aye, look Eastward!"”

Lewis Carroll book Sylvie and Bruno

Source: Sylvie and Bruno (1889), Chapter 25 : Looking Eastward

Love , Faith , Hope , Soul

“By day certainly the combatants have a clearer notion, though even then by no means of all that takes place, no one knowing much of anything that does not does not go on in his own immediate neighborhood; but in a night engagement ( and this was the only one that occurred between great armies during the war) how could anyone know anything for certain?”

Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War

Book VII, 7.44-[1]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VII

War

“Best blessing of all is water, And gold like a fiery flame gleaming at night,
Supreme amidst the pride of lordly wealth.”

Pindar book Olympic Odes

Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, ὁ δὲ χρυσὸς αἰθόμενον πῦρ ἅτε διαπρέπει
νυκτὶ μεγάνορος ἔξοχα πλούτου.
Olympian 1, line 1-2; page 1
Closer translation:
Best is water, but gold stands out blazing like fire
at night beyond haughty wealth.
Olympian Odes (476 BC)

Water , Wealth

“Who rides, so late, through night and wind?
It is the father with his child.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Der Erlkönig

Der Erlkönig (1782)
Context: Who rides, so late, through night and wind?
It is the father with his child.
He holds the boy in the crook of his arm
He holds him safe, he keeps him warm.

“The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods…”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Other Gods (1921)
Context: The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods...' There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging... Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!

Men , God , Books , Dance

“Desire to sleep has vanished now,
Spring has arrived in the night
In the wake of a storm.”

Hermann Hesse book Gertrud

Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 164
Context: The south winds roars at night,
Curlews hasten in their flight,
The air is damp and warm.
Desire to sleep has vanished now,
Spring has arrived in the night
In the wake of a storm.

Spring , Sleep

“I am not all that is. I am Life fighting Nothingness. I am not Nothingness, I am the Fire which burns in the Night. I am not the Night. I am the eternal Light; I am not an eternal destiny soaring above the fight. I am free Will which struggles eternally. Struggle and burn with Me.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

Jean-Christophe (1904 - 1912), Journey's End: The Burning Bush (1911)
Context: "Thou art come back to me, Thou art come back to me! O Thou, whom I had lost!... Why didst Thou abandon me?"
"To fulfil My task, that thou didst abandon."
"What task?"
"My fight."
"What need hast Thou to fight? Art Thou not master of all?"
"I am not the master."
"Art Thou not All that Is?"
"I am not all that is. I am Life fighting Nothingness. I am not Nothingness, I am the Fire which burns in the Night. I am not the Night. I am the eternal Light; I am not an eternal destiny soaring above the fight. I am free Will which struggles eternally. Struggle and burn with Me."

Life , Light , Fight

“Just always be waiting for me, and then some night you will hear me crowing.”

J. M. Barrie book Peter Pan

Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 17
Context: The last thing he ever said to me was, "Just always be waiting for me, and then some night you will hear me crowing."

Waiting

Quotes about the night page 5

Quotes about the night
page 5