Quotes about darkness

page 13

“With their hands clasped like children in a fairy tale, she fell asleep beside him in the dark.”

“Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know,
I do not fear the night above
As I fear the friends below.”

“It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before.”

“Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.”

“Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”

“It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.”

“His love for her was a gift he gave her daily, expecting nothing in return. He walked at her side, his love for her a torch to guide her footsteps along the dark path she walked.”

“Walk with care in dark places, and do not put your faith in anyone who promises you the forgiveness of the Lord or a certain place in Paradise.”

“It is only the darkness in our own hearts that will defeat us, in the end.”

“You have a dark heart in you, Valentine’s daughter,” he said. “You just won’t admit it. And if you want Jace, you had better accept it. Because he belongs to me now.”

“To make great art, you had to expose your soul, and some things should be left safely in the dark.”

“Our achievements may make us interesting, Tyler, but our darkness makes us lovable.”

“Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.”

“Who’ll come lie down in the dark with me
Belly to belly and knee to knee
Who’ll look into my hooded eye
Who’ll lie down under my darkened thigh?”

“At times God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us to heed Him. Song birds are taught to sing in the dark, and we are put into the shadow of God’s hand until we learn to hear Him.”

“And starward drifts the stricken world,
Lone in unalterable gloom
Dead, with a universe for tomb,
Dark, and to vaster darkness whirled.
(“The Testimony of the Suns”)”

“Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”

“A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he'll never crow. I have seen the light and I'm crowing.”

“What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?”

“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.”

“Barrons." I hastily shoved the phone between the cushions.

Ms. Lane." He inclined his dark head.

You tattooed me, you bastard." I got right to the point.”

“Upon him I will visit famine and a fire.
Till all around him desolation rings
And all the demons in the outer dark
Look on amazed and recognize
That vengeance is the business of a man.”

“The seconds tick. They always do. The power of an entire sun cannot stop them even for a moment, and so death comes between the moments, like a thief of light in the dark.”

“There is a way to master silence
Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners
And listen to the hiss of time outside”

“My stomach churned. The monster had mimicked Thalia perfectly. If I'd heard that voice in the dark, calling for help, I would've run straight toward it.”

“War is not heroic. War is not exhilarating. War is full of despair. It is dark. It is dreadful. It is a thing of sorrow and gloom. That is why people fear war. That is why people choose to avoid it.
~Izuru Kira”

“What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.”

“Say what you will, there is something fine about our old aristocracy. I'll bet Trotsky couldn't hit a moving secretary with an egg on a dark night.”

“I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)”

“There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.”

“That's what happens when you fall. Everything that was bright about you becomes dark. As brilliant as you once were, that's how evil you become. It's a long way to fall”

“Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give.”

“Turn away. From the darkness, the madness, the pain. Open your eyes and look at the light.”

“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

“I don’t need to be reminded that we’re up to our heads in dark water. I just want you boys to remember that we’re the gods-damned sharks.”

“He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.”

“The water is DEEP AND DARK AND DANGEROUS”

“You are my sunlight in the dark and the ground beneath my feet.”

“Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?”

“Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?”

“Have you, in truth, ever seen something so heartbreakingly lovely? What are we to make of a world where stars shine bright in the midst of so much darkness and gloom?”

“I, while the gods laugh, the world's vortex am;
Maelström of passions in that hidden sea
Whose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me;
And in small compass the dark waters cram.”

“Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one instant before dying, man is still immortal.”

“Light does not come from light, but from darkness.”

“That's what living in their world is-a big lie. An illusion where everyone looks the other way and pretends that nothing unpleasant exists at all, no goblins of the dark, no ghosts of the soul.”

“This horror will grow mild, this darkness light.”

“So, there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil Librarians.”

“Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.”

“I am an author of Christian Fantasy. My first 7 books were Christian Romance, but I came over to the Dark Side when I heard there were cookies.”

“Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.”

“The rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark.”

“Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."

[Q&A with Larry McCaffery,, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]”

“I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”

“They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other”

“Who's there?' he called, then frowned. 'Of course,' he added, addressing the darkness all around, 'even I, as a Shadowhunter, have seen enough movies to know that anyone who yells 'Who's there?”

“You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.”

“The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.”

“The glue of mutual need that bonded us so tightly together for all those years is melting away. Dark patches, not light, show in the spaces between us.”

“Yes, I know it.
In the darkness of my dark beating heart,
I know. He'd have loved it alright.
You see?
Even Death Has A Heart.”

“But the warriors true, the brave of heart
Who valiently upheld the right
They are raised on high to the velvet sky
Bringing light to the darkness of night”

“If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I would probably look better. I just wouldn't look like me.”

“The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.”

“The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.”

“It's a GIRL.
It's a little girl, with scrunched-up petal lips and a tuft of dark hair and hands in tiny fits, up by her ears. All that time, that's who was in there. And it's weird, but the minute I saw her I just thought: IT'S YOU. Of course it is.”

“They're a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It's said that without whiskey to soak and soften the world, they'd kill themselves. (Irish)”

“I am a demon hunter. Clearly, I am not afraid of the dark.”

“And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.”

“Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”

“This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.”

“Shall I turn up the light for you?

No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.”

“You know children, always playing with the forces of darkness.”

“I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day.”

“You were the leaves, basking in the sunlight.
I was the root, growing in the darkness
~Danzo”

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”

“You can not make yourself whole again by brooding one hundred percent of the time on the darkness of the world. We are the light of the world.”

“Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark”

“Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.”

“Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.”

“Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”

“He looked at her, and the clarity of his dark eyes struck her heart with a sensation of a wound touched.”

“I want to believe that I'm not wrong. I want to believe that life isn't full of darkness. Even if storms come to pass, the sun will shine again. No matter how painful and hard the rain may beat down on me.”

“Achilles makes a sound like choking. “There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.” His spearpoint flies in a dark whirlwind, bright as the evening-star, to catch the hollow at Hector’s throat.”

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears.'
Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary-she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

“Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!”

“Awareness
There is a dark place.
A place where I have no eyes, no mouth. No words.
I can't cry out because I have no breath. The silence is so deep I want to die.
But I can't.
The darkness and silence go on forever.
It is not a dream.
I don't dream.”

“Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.”

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

“Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting… By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”

“Things can be seen better in the darkness," he said, as if he had just seen into her mind. "But the longer you spend in the dark, the harder it becomes to return to the world aboveground where the light is”

“In this country, some aristocratic families automatically categorize persons with dark skin, thick lips, and kinky hair as "Barias" [Amharic for slave]… let it be clear to everybody that I shall soon make these ignoramuses stoop and grind corn!”

“The money men make from their willingness to work the least desirable hours is not a sign of discrimination against women, but a sign of the willingness of mostly married men to lose sleep to support the family as their wife loses sleep to feed the child. A willingness to do the uncomfortable shifts is one reason married men earn more than twice what never-married men earn. Men's contribution, made at night, need not be lost in the dark.”

“The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition. Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television images bringing the world into the living room. Most important, a newborn infant could expect to live not to age forty-five, but to age seventy-two. The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”

“Will saw the cruelty now as the fierce inevitability of nature. It was not from malice that the Light and the servants of the Light would ever hound the Dark, but from the nature of things.”

“Tombed in the solid night of starless space;
From nearest living orb so far removed,
That light, of all material things most swift,
Myriads on myriads of earth's years must speed,
Ere the mere outskirts of that Stygian gloom,
If ever, it might reach,-at rest eterne,
Lies the cold wreck of an extinguished sun.
Prime glory once of all heaven's radiant host;
Body, for soul of purest light most fit-
'Tween its first darkening, and eclipse complete,
Streamed years which might eternity appear;
While into ether, like the particles,
Invisible, which are the breath of flowers,
The mighty bulk its softer elements
Still ever was exhaling. As when flesh
And sinew of earth's monster Mastodon,
By the slow wasting of the elements,
All are dissolved, and hard, enduring bones
Alone remain,- even so, of this immense,-
When, by the ocean waves of centuries,
Millions succeeding millions, worn away,-
The adamantine skeleton alone,
In darkness, silence, utter solitude,
A ruin for eternity, was left.”

“So many people are throwing up their hands because the world has gotten so dark, but I went against the current and I actually found more light and positive energy. That was a great feeling.”

“Value differences in painting always cut in; color differences always go side by side. Laterally. Color differences can illustrate three dimensional form, but using color in terms of hue belongs more properly to painting than modelling with dark and light [as in sculpting] does.”

“That is how it seems…. But we can’t read the darkness, Mr. Scoresby. It is more than possible that I might be wrong.”

“For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.”

“All over the world with thee, my love!
All over the world with thee;
I care not what sky may low'r above,
Or how dark our path may be.”