Quotes about the night
page 9

“What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Family, Baby

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land

Thinking

“The light of a new day always chases the shadows of the night away, and shows us that the shape of our fears is only the ghost of our own minds.”

Terry Goodkind book Wizard's First Rule

Source: Wizard's First Rule

Fear, Light

“I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy…”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

Boy, Kiss, Reading, Dance

“The night belongs to beasts of prey, and always has. It's easy to forget that when you're indoors, protected by light and solid walls.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkheart

Light, Forgetting

“There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Life

“What is success?" poses the Copt. "It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Variant: What is success? It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace
Source: Manuscript Found in Accra

Peace, Soul, Success

“Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: "She’s never coming home." A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

Truth, Home

“I may have been dead for the past hundred and fifty years, Susannah,… but that doesn't mean I don't know how people say good night. And generally, when people say good night, they keep their tongues to themselves.”

Meg Cabot book Ninth Key

Source: Ninth Key

People, Past, Dead

“I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Life

“Let me say to you what I said once, in an entirely different context to Catherine the Great," Magnus declared. "My dear lady, you cannot afford me, and also, please leave that horse alone. Good night.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Midnight Heir

Horse

“I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: CAT'S EYE.

Lie, Cry

“Myst hasn't returned yet, But you know that, or else you'd both be naked and fornicating on the front lawn"
"The night's young. Give us time, and it was a field a mile away."

A Valkyrie and Nikolai Wroth pg 322”

Kresley Cole book A Hunger Like No Other

Source: A Hunger Like No Other

Time

“The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”

Haruki Murakami book Dance Dance Dance

Source: Dance Dance Dance

Good Night, Time, Painting

“We couldn't understand because we were too far… and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign… and no memories.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Age, Travel, Understanding, Memory

“It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Life, Sleep, Water

“Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks - I've got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night.”

Irving Berlin (1888–1989) American composer

Sun

“One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something which for the time being has slipped my memory.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Source: Mike and Psmith

Sleep, Memory, Time, Forgetting

“I just want to let you know that when I look into my future, I see nothing but you.” That’s what Chaz had whispered in my ear at some point during the wedding last night.

Then he’d whispered. “And you’re not even wearing Spanx.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Wedding, Future

“By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Soul, Star

“I lived in the royal library, among all the books."
"You resided in a… library?"
"Theresuites inside and great balconies that overlooked the city, but yes. I was most content among those shelves, so one night, I simply never left.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Shadow's Claim

Books

“The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

“I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

Light

“I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Travel, Sleep

“You're the reason I get out of bed every night. And you're the reason I can't wait to come home every dawn. Not the war. Not the Brothers. Not even Butch. It's… you.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Unleashed

War, Home, Waiting

“And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Fear, Smile, Tear, Water

“I guess nothing puts a damper on a one-night stand as much as your friend pointing out all the opportunities where you might have been killed.”

Mindy Kaling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

“Every night, and every morn,
Some to misery are born.
Every morn, and every night,
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to endless night.”

William Blake book Songs of Experience

Source: Poems from the Pickering Manuscript (c. 1805), Auguries of Innocence, Line 123
Source: Songs of Experience

“Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”

Elena Ferrante book My Brilliant Friend

Source: My Brilliant Friend

Children

“We did just leave an insane asylum,” Hi agreed. “For all we know, Chance spend his nights dancing naked with sock puppets, plotting to invade Canada.”

Kathy Reichs book Seizure

Source: Seizure

Chance, Dance

“Sometimes I wish I had never met you, because then I could go to sleep at night not knowing there was someone like you out there.”

Gus Van Sant (1952) American film director, producer, photographer and musician

Source: Good Will Hunting

Cute, Sleep

“She laced her fingers through his. "Good night," she whispered. With their hands clasped like children in a fairy tale, she fell asleep beside him in the dark.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Children

“Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn't be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.”

Robin McKinley (1952) American fantasy writer

Source: Pegasus

“It's over when you decide it's over," Norah says. "When you call it a night. The rest is just a matter of where the sun is in the sky. That has nothing to do with us.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Sun

“Our love was born
outside the walls,
in the wind,
in the night,
in the earth,
and that's why the clay and the flower,
the mud and the roots
know your name.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Love, Flowers

“I sipped my own coffee, heavy on the sugar and cream, trying to make up for the late work the night before. Caffeine and sugar, the two basic food groups.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Cerulean Sins

Source: Cerulean Sins

Food, Coffee

“A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Source: Neuromancer (1984)
Context: A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void… The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

Dreams, Hope, Sleep, Speed

“The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Way, Kiss

“Inner guidance is heard like soft music in the night by those who have learned to listen.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Music, Learning

“The night is just a part of the day”

Paulo Coelho book Brida

Source: Brida

Parting

“When she played her music even the night demons stopped their work & it took them some time to remember what it was they were doing & the best of them had no stomach for it for a long time after that.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Music, Time

“Hip," I murmur, remembering last night, how I lost it completely in a stall at Nell's---my mouth foaming, all I could think about were insects, lots of insects, and running at pigeons, foaming at the mouth and running at pigeons.”

Bret Easton Ellis book American Psycho

Source: American Psycho

Thinking

“Do your thing, Ms. Lane. you might be criminally young, but the night is not.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

“… morning is the soul's night.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Soul

“May night continue to fall upon the orchestra”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

“It feels like my soul is slowly leaving my body and heading off to an unknown place, some "safe" place where it doesn't have to put up with me and my night terrors.”

Paulo Coelho book Adultery

Source: Adultery

Feeling, Soul

“We sat in the car
& the night dropped
down until the
only sounds were
the crickets &
the dance of our voices

& for a moment
the world became
small enough to
roll back & forth
between us.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Hearing Voices - Volume 5: Collected Stories and Drawings

World, Cars, Dance

“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) French novelist and art critic

Source: Against Nature

Dreams, Idea, Solitude, Reading

“You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Source: Selected Letters

Home

“He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

Source: Dubliners

Feeling, Waiting

“Take me from this earth
an endless night-
this, the end of life.
From the dark I feel your lips
and taste your bloody kiss.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Life, Feeling, Kiss

“.

I spent all this time building a relationship. Then one night I left the window open and it started to rust.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Time

“A man in the jungle at night, as someone said, may suppose a hyena's growl to be a lion's; but when he hears the lion's growl, he knows damn well it's a lion.”

Sheldon Vanauken (1914–1996) American journalist

Source: A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy and Triumph

“Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence”

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) American poet

Silence, Sea

“that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Suicide, Sleep, Waiting, Forgetting

“in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: Selected Poems

“When you walk on the beach at night, you can say things you can't say in real life.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Life

“He understood how dangerous oaths could be. But Leo didn't care.
"I'm coming back for you, Calypso," he said to the night wind. "I swear it on the River Styx.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

“I can’t believe this night. I was supposed to be applauded and instead, I’m ruined. I swear to God in heaven if I ever see that man again, I will commit murder. (Tory)
Well, if you need help moving the body, you know where Kim and I live. (Pam)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

God, Help

“Now I know I am an intellectual. I saw Malcolm Muggeridge on the television last night, and I understood nearly every word. It all adds up. A bad home, poor diet, not liking punk. I think I will join the library and see what happens.”

Sue Townsend (1946–2014) English writer and humorist

Home, Thinking

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Source: Memoria de mis putas tristes

Love

“I love the silent hour of night,
For blissful dreams may then arise,
Revealing to my charmed sight
What may not bless my waking eyes.”

Anne Brontë (1820–1849) British novelist and poet

Source: Best Poems of the Brontë Sisters

Good Night, Love, Dreams

“He was a worried man (I'm stretching the term a bit here, I know. By now, in his mid to late teens, he might just about have passed for a man. When seen from behind. At a distance. On a very dark night).”

Jonathan Stroud book Ptolemy's Gate

Source: Ptolemy's Gate

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“Buttercup's mother hesitated, then put her stew spoon down. (This was after stew, but so is everything. When the first man first clambered from the slime and made his first home on land, what he had for supper that first night was stew.)”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Home

“I came home one night, some month ago, and I went to the closet in my bedroom… and a moth ate my sports jacket.
He was laying on the floor, nauseous, y'know.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Home, Sport

“It's a fine line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

“It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Sadness, Time

“The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.”

Patricia Highsmith book Strangers on a Train

Source: Strangers on a Train

Time, Drawing

“Em,” he said again, his eyes wide and dark blue in the dim light. “Did you kiss Mark the other night?”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Kiss, Light

“Erik: Are you very tired?
Christine: Oh, tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead.
Erik: Your soul is a beautiful thing, child. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept to-night.”

Gaston Leroux book The Phantom of the Opera

Source: The Phantom of the Opera

Beauty, Angels, Soul, Dead

“And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Fight

“When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

Star, Distant

“There are many ways a self-respecting (not to mention sane) teenage girl might react to having a teenage boy suddenly in her bedroom in the middle of the night.
Hit.
Panic.
Flail.
Freeze.”

Ally Carter book Only the Good Spy Young

Source: Only the Good Spy Young

Way, Girl, Boy

“I lay in bed at night crying to myself. The only one who loved me and watched over me was someone I couldn't see or hear or touch.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Source: My Story

Love, Cry

“Hey, you’re lucky. My cabin is closest to the stables. I can hear her yelling all night: FIRST PLACE OR DEATH! AN A MINUS IS A FAILING GRADE! Leo really needs to design a gag that’s better than my old sock.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Death

“A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

“I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.”

Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004) American actor and comedian

Game, Fight, Hockey

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend… if you have one.""Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one."”

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

“It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Life

“You and me Haymitch. Very cozy. Picnics, birthdays, long winter nights sitting around the fire retelling old Hunger Games tale.
-Peeta Mellark”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Hunger, Game, Birthday, Winter

“Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.”

Victor Hugo book The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Source: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

“The blackest night must end in dawn, the light dispel the dreamer's fear.”

Anne McCaffrey (1926–2011) American-Irish novelist

Fear, Light

“Don’t you just hate nights like that, when you think over every mistake you’ve made, every hurt you’ve received, every bit of meanness you’ve dealt out? There’s no profit in it, no point to it, and you need sleep.”

Charlaine Harris Dead and Gone

Source: Dead and Gone

Hate, Thinking, Sleep, Hurt

“Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquillity, a timelessness, about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colourful as a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

Source: My Family and Other Animals (1956)

Waiting

“I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.”

N. Scott Momaday (1934) American author

Dreams, Sea

“And [he] sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him
and it was still hot”

Maurice Sendak book Where the Wild Things Are

Source: Where the Wild Things Are

Waiting

“Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Light, Future, Country

“I drove in last night,' he said. 'I couldn't sleep, it was too hot. So I went outside. I was feeling melancholy. Then I danced with a beautiful girl, and I felt better. What's your story?”

Jude Watson book What I Saw and How I Lied

Source: What I Saw and How I Lied

Beauty, Feeling, Girl, Sleep

“… there's no such thing as an underwear elf. Even when it goes missing, it's somewhere in the room. So make sure you find it." -- DARK OF NIGHT by Suzanne Brockmann”

Suzanne Brockmann (1960) American writer

Source: Dark of Night

“She's singing to-night to bring the chandelier down!”

Gaston Leroux book The Phantom of the Opera

Source: The Phantom of the Opera

Singing

“Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.”

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

World, Sleep

“When I was a fetus, I used to sneak out at night when my mother was sleeping. I figured I should start stealing stuff while I still had no fingerprints.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Sleep

“We didn’t know what was ahead of us then. We were just two teenagers, looking up at the sky on a cold February night. So no, he didn’t give me flowers or candy. He gave me the moon and the stars. Infinity.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Variant: We were just two teenagers, looking up at the sky on a cold February night. So no, he didn’t give me flowers or candy. He gave me the moon and the stars. Infinity.
Source: We'll Always Have Summer

Star, Flowers

“That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.”

Siri Hustvedt (1955) novelist, essayist, poet

Source: The Blindfold

“Suddenly the day was gone,
night came out from under each tree and spread.”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

Source: The Halloween Tree

Tree

“Hi, I'm one of the knife-carrying hooligans you met last night in Pandemonium? I'm afraid I made a bad impression and was hoping you'd give me a chance to make it up to- "
"SIMON!”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Clary held the phone away from her ear as he cracked up laughing. "That is so not funny!"
Simon and Clary, pg. 19
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Hope, Chance