Quotes about dusk

A collection of quotes on the topic of dusk, day, likeness, night.

Quotes about dusk

“Dusk falls. There is nothing gentle
about the sky.”

Juan Ramón Jimenéz (1881–1958) Spanish poet

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Light, Sun

“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Source: Night and Day

Beauty, Winter

“He closed his eyes and sank into the warm dusk that separates consciosness and sleep, where reality bends and sways to the wind of thought, and where creativity blossoms in its freedom from boundaries and all things are possible.”

Christopher Paolini (1983) American author

Reality, Sleep, Freedom

“That narrow window, I expect,
Serves but to let the dusk in - "
"But please," said I, "to recollect
'Twas fashioned by an architect
Who pinned his faith on Ruskin!”

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

Canto 3
Phantasmagoria (1869)

Faith, Fashion

“Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think of the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got hold of, and never would.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)

God, Hope, Thinking

“I used to smoke marijuana. But I'll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening - or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, midevening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid-afternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning... But never at dusk! Never at dusk, I would never do that.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Comedy album A Wild and Crazy Guy

Marijuana

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

- Harkat Mulds (Hunters of the Dusk)”

Darren Shan book Hunters of the Dusk

Source: Hunters of the Dusk

Knowledge

“Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.”

Stephen King The Running Man

Source: The Running Man

“All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.”

Kiran Desai book The Inheritance of Loss

Source: The Inheritance of Loss

Color, Mountain, Water

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Life, Loneliness, Night

“… dusk is the time when men whisper of matters about which they remain silent in the full light of the sun.”

Simon Raven (1927–2001) British writer

Men, Light, Time, Sun

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Women, World, Understanding, Bird

“You said I was your number-one pick."
"And you are. In our hearts. Alphabetically, though, Dusk comes before you.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: The Maleficent Seven: From the World of Skulduggery Pleasant

Heart

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 10, sc. 2
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Thinking

“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise

Sadness, Silence, Time

“The dusk reeks of fornication and bad consciences.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

“If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

People, Light

“the mind is its own beautiful prisoner.
Mind looked long at the sticky moon
opening in dusk her new wings

then decently hanged himself, one afternoon.

The last thing he saw was you
naked amid unnaked things…”

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

Beauty

“There's a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night's.”

Ed Gorman (1941–2016) American writer

Source: Everybody's Somebody's Fool

Loneliness, Night

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Love, Color, Sun

“The blue dusk ran between the streets; my love was winged within my mind;
It left to-day and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind.
To-day was past and dead for me for from to-day my feet had run
Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Love, Way, Past, Dead

“Like a fish in the wind, jumps right out of its knowledge, and lands on the sand. Like when the wind comes ruffling at last, to sailors adrift, trying to manage the broken springs of their muscles, and lever and lift their well rubbed oars, making tiny dents, in the ocean. Like when they're cutting ash poles in the hills, the treetops fall as soft as cloth. Like oak trees swerving out of the hills, and setting their faces to the wind, day after day being practically lifted away, they are lashed to the earth, and never let go, gripping on darkness. All day in a trance of war, men murder each other, but at dusk, silence, only the fingers of fire lifting their questions to the mainland. Is there anybody there, please help. Help. help. Until he's full, and of his own iron will walks on.”

Alice Oswald (1966) British poet

Men, War, Spring, Question

“No sun—no moon—no morn—no noon,
No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day,
No warmth—no cheerfulness—no healthful ease,
No road, no street, no t' other side the way,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

No! http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=3153&poem=27392. <br class="br">1830s

Health, Way, Feeling, Flowers

“I sit cross-legged on the rock
The valleys and streams are cold and damp
Sitting quietly is beautiful
The cliffs are lost in mist and fog
I rest happily in this place
At dusk the tree shadows are low
I look into my mind
A white lotus emerges from the dark mud”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Beauty, Tree

“On a mellow evening in September, I was coming from the garden with a heavy basket of apples which I had been gathering. It had got dusk, and the moon looked over the high wall of the court, causing undefined shadows to lurk in the corners of the numerous projecting portions of the building. I set my burden on the house steps by the kitchen door, and lingered to rest, and draw in a few more breaths of the soft, sweet air; my eyes were on the moon, and my back to the entrance, when I heard a voice behind me say”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Nelly Dean (Ch. X).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Drawing, Housing

“"You mean he's dead too?" asked Suzy.
"Yes," said Dusk. "This morning, in his cell. The guards outside were also slain, and only Sir Thursday's boots remained."
"Sounds more like he escaped," Suzy said.
"His feet were still in the boots," said Dusk.”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Lord Sunday (2010), p. 143.

Dead

“There is an outmoded Burmese proverb still recited by men who wish to deny that women too can play a part in bringing necessary change and progress to their society: "The dawn rises only when the rooster crows." But Burmese people today are well aware of the scientific reasons behind the rising of dawn and the falling of dusk. And the intelligent rooster surely realizes that it is because dawn comes that it crows and not the other way round. It crows to welcome the light that has come to relieve the darkness of night. It is not the prerogative of men alone to bring light to this world: women with their capacity for compassion and self-sacrifice, their courage and perseverance, have done much to dissipate the darkness of intolerance and hate, suffering and despair.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)

Women, Men, Hate, People

“The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.”

Wilfred Owen Anthem for Doomed Youth

Anthem for Doomed Youth

Girl, Flowers, Drawing

“In the life of the academic mind, the owl of Minerva seldom flies as early as the dusk.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'Definition of the Political Thought of Tlön' (p.91)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Life

“Prometheus, I have no Titan's might,
Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart,
For daytime's vulture talons tear apart
The tender alcoves built by love at night.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

"In Common" in Starlanes #14 (April 1954); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006)

Love, Tear, Heart, Night

“The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Two (pp. 50-51).

Men, Flowers, Grass, Water

“Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all
over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.”

Thomas Lux (1946–2017) American poet

"A Little Tooth", in Líneas conectadas. Nueva poesía de los Estados Unidos. April Lindner, Editor. Sarabande Books, Louisville, Kentucky. ISBN 978-1-932-51121-5

Love, Way, Learning, Baby

“THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Epigraph
The October Country (1955)

People, Autumn, Thinking, Sun

“If you talk to the shadows,
at least you know them well
and the words, all of them,
unfold themselves with ease
on muddled walls and streets,
when dusk comes on.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Adagio (2004)
Examples of self-translation (c. 2004)

“She stood at the gate, waiting; behind her the swamp, in front of her Colored Town, beyond it, all Maxwell. Tall and slim and white in the dusk, the girl stood there, hands on the picket gate.”

Lillian Smith (author) book Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit (1944) First lines

Color, Girl, Waiting

“Battles ended with sunset or dusk; so heroes, on special occasions when they needed more time, were vouchsafed victory by the stoppage of the sun in Greek as well as Hebrew saga.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Footnote Iliad 18: 239-242 (cf: 2: 412-18); Joshua 10: 13-14
Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible

Time, Sun, Victory

“Noon sits at the Master's right hand, Dawn at his left. Dusk stands behind, in the shadows. Yet sometimes it is easier to see the light when you stand partly in the darkness.”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Mister Monday (2003), p. 241.

Light

“I don't know if men will ever journey again, as we journeyed, to that intersection of latitude and longitude where a shell hangs forever — forever and yet not forever, in space and out of space — on the axis stretching through time from beginning to end.
From the dawn of the nebulae to the twilight of absolute entropy, when the framework of the cosmos has broken down into chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn to dusk, from beginning to end. For as this world spins on an axis through space, so the sphere of time spins on its own axis.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Source: The Time Axis (1949), Ch. 1 : Encounter In Rio

Men, World, Time

“When your whole world is shaken from all the risks we have taken,
Dance with me, dance with me into the colors of the dusk.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Into the Colors.
Song lyrics, Lifeline (2007)

World, Color, Dance

“She may very well pass for forty three
In the dusk with the light behind her.”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Trial by Jury (1875)

Light

“Tumult, weeping, many new ghosts.
Heartbroken, aging, alone, I sing
To myself. Ragged mist settles
In the spreading dusk. Snow skurries
In the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.”

Du Fu (712–770) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"Snow Storm" (对雪), as translated by Kenneth Rexroth in One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1971), p. 6

Men, Age, Singing

“These ruinous days of Autumn. At dusk,
the brightness seeps through the crumbling air,
at dusk the air gathers up the brightness”

Edward Hirsch (1950)

'The Renunciation of Poetry'

Autumn

“O pretty ship, my memory
Isn't this far enough to sea,
And the sea not fit to drink?
Haven't we drifted far and lost
From fair dawn to dreary dusk?”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Alcools

Mon beau navire ô ma mémoire
Avons-nous assez navigué
Dans une onde mauvaise à boire
Avons-nous assez divagué
De la belle aube au triste soir
"La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" (Song of the Poorly Loved), line 51; translation by William Meredith, from Francis Steegmuller Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 95.
Alcools (1912)

Drink, Memory, Sea

“Eat in the dark the bargain that you purchased in the dusk.”

Ernest Bramah book Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat

The Story of Kin Wen and the Miraculous Tusk
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928)

“Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing!”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake (1939)

“These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet;—

Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day;—
Under the laurel the Blue,
Under the willow, the Gray.”

Francis Miles Finch (1827–1907) American judge

The Blue and the Gray, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Waiting

“Who knows who wrote that song of summer,
That blackbirds sing at dusk,
This is a song of colour,
Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust,
Then climb into bed and turn to dust.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sky of Honey (Disc 2)

Singing, Summer

“Between the lines it must have hurt
To see the neighborhood go down,
Your neighbor in his undershirt
At dusk come out to mow his lawn.”

Donald Justice (1925–2004) Poet, teacher

To the Unknown Lady Who Wrote the Letters Found In the Hatbox
Night Light (1967)

Hurt

“In eras when authority or at least specific authorities have been questioned, there is more tendency to examine the roots of and the need for authority. The owl of Minerva flies not in the dusk but in the storm.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 4, Authority And Responsibility, p. 65

Question

“A Frenchman cried and Connelly squatted beside him, took the man's hand, and talked of Ireland. He told the uncomprehending Frenchman of Connaught's beauty, of its women, of fields so fat that a lamb was full grown in a week, of rivers so thick that the fish begged to be caught, and the Frenchman quieted and Connelly patted his hair and told him he was brave, and he was proud of him, and beyond the small grating the sky darkened into dusk and the orderlies came down again and dragged the Frenchman, who had died, head-bumping up the steps.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 184
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Sword (1983)

Women, Beauty, Fish

“O’er folded blooms
On swirls of musk,
The beetle booms adown the glooms
And bumps along the dusk.”

James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) American poet from Indianapolis

The Beetle.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Earthly joy can take but a bat-like flight, always checked, always limited, in dusk and darkness. But the love of Christ breaks through the vaulting, and leads us up into the free sky above, expanding to the very throne of Jehovah, and drawing us still upward to the infinite heights of glory.”

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836–1879) British poet and hymn-writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 399.

Love, Joy, Christ, Drawing

“The fragrant hair,
Falling as through the silence falleth now
Dusk of the air.”

James Joyce book Pomes Penyeach

Tutto E Sciolto, p. 13
Pomes Penyeach (1927)

Silence

“Ever since, the Paris wherein I have tried to retrace her steps has remained as silent and deserted as it was on the day. I walk through empty streets. For me, they are always empty, even at dusk, during the rush hour, when the crowds are hurrying towards the mouth of metro. I think of her in spite of myself, sensing an echo of her presence in this neighbourhood or that. The other evening, it was near the Gare du Nord.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

The Search Warrant (2000)

Thinking, Sense

“Look upon men and pity them. Look at yourself amid all men and pity yourself. In the obscure dusk of life we touch and fumble at each other, we ask questions, we listen, we shout for help.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

Life, Men, Question, Help

“Was this perhaps life, then?—to have loved one summer in youth and not to have been aware of it until it was over, some sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints, the fragrance of a woman, soft loving lips in the dusk of a summer night, sea birds; and then nothing more; gone.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love, Life, Youth, Bird

“From the dawn of the day to the dusk he toiled,
Shaping fanciful playthings, with tireless hands, —
Useless trumpery toys; and, with vaulting heart,
Gave them unto all peoples, who mocked at him,
Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their way.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)

People, Way, Heart

“It was growing dusk, the blue hour when solid things take on a certain transparency and phantoms become palpable.”

Kage Baker book The Graveyard Game

Source: The Graveyard Game (2001), Chapter 27, “Avalon” (p. 244)

“It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

Senlin: A Biography (1918)

Star, Light, Learning

“And lately, by the Tavern Door agape,
Came shining through the Dusk an Angel Shape
Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder; and
He bid me taste of it; and 'twas — the Grape!”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Angels

“What vain weathercocks we are! I, who had determined to hold myself independent of all social intercourse, and thanked my stars that at length I had lighted on a spot where it was next to impracticable. I, weak wretch, after maintaining till dusk a struggle with low spirits and solitude, was finally compelled to strike my colours; and under pretence of gaining information concerning the necessities of my establishment, I desired Mrs. Dean.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Mr. Lockwood (Ch. IV).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Star, Solitude, Light

“When the peace of autumn has become poetic instead of being taken for granted, the last day of the plover become a matter of personal regret, the pony become associated with the history of art and mythology, the evening ice-film on the farm stream become reminiscent of crystal, and the smoke from the chimney become a message to us from those who discovered fire—then the time has come to say goodbye... I had long begun to count the days until I could once again leave home, where I felt an alien, and go out into the alien world, where I was at home. But still I paused for a while over my thoughts of departure, and listened to the silence that had robbed the gods of sleep; and dusk sank slowly over the ponies.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

God, World, Peace, Art

“I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.”

Li Bai Self-Abandonment

"Self-Abandonment" ( 自遣 http://www.chinese-poems.com/lb14t.html), as translated by Arthur Waley (1919)

Drink

“For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods. I used to go back there in the evening from the city when it grew dusk, and for me it was not just another place but a point of view, a way of life. For instance, I saw no difference between those hills and these ancient ones where I played as a child and where I live now: the same broken, straggling country, cultivated and wild, the same roads, farmhouses, and ravines. I used to climb up there in the evening as if I too were fleeing the nightly shock of the air-raid alarms.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Incipit
The house on the hill (1949)

Life, Way, Time, Sea

“At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

Men, Mountain, Star, Parting

“In shapeless clumps the ferns are brown and dead
Among the fir-trees dusk is swiftly born:
The maples will be desolate by morn
The last word of the summer has been said”

Francis Joseph Sherman (1871–1926) Canadian writer

"October" (sonnet) http://www.sonnets.org/shermanf.htm

Tree, Summer, Dead

“In no time at all his cheerful face appeared at the door of the spring dusk. In the street among peaceable strangers he did a handstand. Then easy and impervious, in full control, he cartwheeled eastward into the source of night.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"The Pale Pink Roast" (1959)

Spring, Appearance, Time, Night

“Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 10, sc. 2
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Night

“When I landed on the top of a lamppost in the London dusk it was peeing with rain.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Amulet of Samarkand

The Amulet of Samarkand (2003)

“People talk about nightfall, or night falling, or dusk falling, and it's never seemed right to me. Perhaps they once meant befalling. As in night befalls. As in night happens. Perhaps they, whoever they were, thought of a falling sun. That might be it, except that that ought to give us dayfall. Day fell on Rupert the Bear. And we know, if we've ever read a book, that day doesn't fall or rise. It breaks. In books, day breaks, and night falls.
In life, night rises from the ground. The day hangs on for as long as it can, bright and eager, absolutely and positively the last guest to leave the party, while the ground darkens, oozing night around your ankles, swallowing for ever that dropped contact lens, making you miss that low catch in the gully on the last ball of the last over.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

Life, People, Books, Reading

“He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars;
Winds take a pensive tone and stars a tender fire
And visions rise and change which kill me with desire.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

The Prisoner (October 1845)

Star, Change

“More beautiful and soft than any moth
With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path
Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines
Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall
To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls,
Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"The Landscape near an Aerodrome"
Poems (1933)

Beauty, Feeling

“[M]any quite frankly fought to protect slavery, which laid on the survivors of the rebel armies an incubus to which few were willing to admit in alter years. More than just one out of three Confederates whose campfires dotted South Mountain in the June dusk owned slaves… [T]hey brought slaves with them on campaign to tend to the menial jobs… The slave system had invested them with an instinctive impulse for domestic dictatorship; they could brawl, stab, and shoot, in and out of race tracks and saloons, and still assume that they were God's natural aristocrats.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

Source: 2010s, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2013), p. 15

God, Mountain, Nature

“I remember when I was doing a film with Fred Astaire, it was nothing for him to work three or four days on two bars of music. One evening in the dark grey hours of dusk, I was walking across the deserted MGM lot when a small, weary figure with a towel around his neck suddenly appeared out of the giant cube sound stages. It was Fred. He came over to me, threw a heavy arm around my shoulder and said: "Oh Alan, why doesn't someone tell me I cannot dance?" The tormented illogic of his question made any answer insipid, and all I could do was walk with him in silence.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Alan Jay Lerner in Lerner, Alan Jay. On the Street Where I Live. New York: Norton, 1978. p. 89. (M).

Music, Question, Silence, Appearance

“Who said "Peacock Pie"?
The old king to the sparrow:
Who said "Crops are ripe"?
Rust to the harrow.

Who said, "Ay, mum's the word"?
Sexton to willow.
Who said, "Green dusk for dream?"
Moss for a pillow.

Who said, "All Time’s delight
Hath she for narrow bed;
Life’s troubled bubble broken"?—
That’s what I said.”

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

The Song of the Mad Prince

Life, Dreams, Time

“It was around dusk when my companion and I noticed the position of sun closer to the west horizon, and the sun was going up.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

When he saw this strange phenomenon while he was travelling from London to Chicago on December 14, 1963, by a jet plane.
When Prof Jayant Narlikar saw the sun rise in the west

Sun

“However, living in Tel Aviv, he was spared the fate of equivalent figures in English culture, an endless round of arts programmes where those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will be remembered only for remembering someone else.”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

"Kafka in Las Vegas", p. 347.
Referring to Max Brod
Writing Home (1994)

Fate, Art, Memory

“STILL LIFE: The short British wintertime as seen from within my cocoon. Snow three feet deep in places. Icicles. The small ones outside fighting for survival. Dusk before four. Yellow light in the crisp still. A jackdaw's wing beat precisely preserved. An atmosphere.”

Roy Harper (singer) (1941) British musician

Life, Light, Fight

“I saw the Colonel empty his revolver and go down under ten wild boys. A moment later they tossed his bleeding head into the air and started a ball game. Just at dusk the wild boys got up and padded away. They left the bodies stripped to the skin many with genitals cut off. The wild boys make little testicles in which they carry their hasish and khat.”

William S. Burroughs book The Wild Boys

The Wild Boys (1971)

Game, Boy

“The truth about the world about us.' 'Truth' is a word used in many different ways - 'You’re not telling the truth.' 'The truth about conditions in Russia.' 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.' I want to use it here in the sense of what lies behind and outward show. I. et me hasten to explain by giving an example. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That is what we see; that is the ‘outward show'. In the past the outward show was regarded as the truth. But then a scientist came along to question it and then to announce that the truth was quite different from the appearance: the truth was that the earth revolved and the sun remained still -the outward show was telling a lie. The curious thing about scientific truths like this is that they often seem so useless. It makes no difference to the average man whether the sun moves or the earth moves. He still has to rise at dawn and stop work at dusk. But because a thing is useless it does not mean that it is valueless. Scientists still think it worthwhile to pursue truth. They do not expect that laws of gravitation and relativity are going to make much difference to everyday life, but they think it is a valuable activity to ask their eternal questions about the universe. And so we say that truth - the thing they are looking for—is a value.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, Truth, Lie, World

“Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Through the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson The Lady of Shalott

Pt. I, st. 2
The Lady of Shalott (1832)

“Love, unconquerable,
Waster of rich men, keeper
Of warm lights and all-night vigil
In the soft face of a girl:
Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor!
Even the pure immortals cannot escape you,
And mortal man, in his one day's dusk,
Trembles before your glory.”

Sophocles (-496–-406 BC) ancient Greek tragedian

Source: Antigone, Line 781 (Ode III)

Love, Men, Girl, Light

“The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air.”

Clifford D. Simak book Cemetery World

Cemetery World (1973)
Context: The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air. It was time, I knew, to be getting back to camp. But I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.

Tree, Sun

“The monks of the earliest days had not counted on the human ability to generate a new cultural inheritance in a couple of generations if an old one is utterly destroyed, to generate it by virtue of lawgivers and prophets, geniuses or maniacs; through a Moses, or through a Hitler, or an ignorant but tyrannical grandfather, a cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave."”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wild-boy from the hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday — someday, or some century — an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years...
Ch 6
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo