Quotes about darkness
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Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things
Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Source: Strange Highways
“In the kingdom of glass everything is transparent, and there is no place to hide a dark heart.”
Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Source: Sunlight and Shadow: A Retelling of The Magic Flute
“Before you can see the Light, you have to deal with the darkness.”
Source: Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior
“Darkness approaches from outside.
I feel no light inside me strong enough to resist it.”
Source: The Last Vampire
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
“Mother Night and May The Darkness Be Merciful!”
Source: Daughter of the Blood
“Who will see you through the darkness? "Me," I key in the answer. "I'll find my own way.”
Source: By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead
Source: Froi of the Exiles
“… and the night is so deep and dark that I wonder if the sun will ever come up.”
Source: I Am the Messenger
“I’m not afraid of the darkness outside.
It’s the darkness inside houses I don’t like.”
“Surrounded by darkness yet enfolded in light”
Source: Moloka'i
Source: The Tale of Despereaux
Variant: Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.
Source: Carmilla
Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 281
Context: Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.
Source: A Secret Affair
“You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.”
Source: The Best of Edward Abbey
Source: The Dogs of Babel
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell
Source: The Coffin Club
“What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.”
Dr. Jonas Lear
Variant: I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to. What dark passages.
Source: The Passage Trilogy, The Passage (2010)
Source: The Portrait of a Lady
Variant: It is the way of weakened minds to see everything through a black cloud. The soul forms its own horizons; your soul is darkened, and consequently the sky of the future appears stormy and unpromising
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo
“Your heart is like the ocean, mysterious and dark.”
“Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness.”
Variant: Creativity — like human life itself — begins in darkness.
Source: The Artist's Way (1992)
Context: Creativity — like human life itself — begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: "And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!" It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.
Source: Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
“Old dark sleepy pool…
Quick unexpected frog
Goes plop! Watersplash!”
Source: Japanese Haiku
Books, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004)
Source: The Alphabet of Grace (1970)
Fairy Tales (1835)
Source: The Ugly Duckling
Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 8, Supplemental image at randi.org http://www.randi.org/images/122801-BlueDot.jpg
Context: Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Context: Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
“Honestly, for an evil god of darkness, he certainly can be dull.”
Source: The Final Empire
Source: When Darkness Comes
Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Source: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad
“If he comes in the dark, then it's KYAG Time!"
- Harkat Mulds (The Lake of Souls)”
Source: The Lake of Souls
Source: Wise Blood
The Expanding Universe (1963)
Source: A Wrinkle in Time
Source: The Mountains of California