Quotes about midnight
page 2

“Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame,
With many a foul and midnight murder fed.”

II. 3. lines 87-88
The Bard (1757)

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Tales of a Wayside Inn

Pt. I, The Landlord's Tale: Paul Revere's Ride, st. 1.
Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874)

Children

“The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities—that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future—will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There's a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

2000 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2000.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Money, Hate, People, Behavior

“Why does God afflict the best of men with ill-health, or sorrow, or other troubles? Because in the army the most hazardous services are assigned to the bravest soldiers: a general sends his choicest troops to attack the enemy in a midnight ambuscade, to reconnoitre his line of march, or to drive the hostile garrisons from their strong places. No one of these men says as he begins his march, " The general has dealt hardly with me," but "He has judged well of me."”
Quare deus optimum quemque aut mala valetudine aut luctu aut aliis incommodis adficit? quia in castris quoque periculosa fortissimis imperantur: dux lectissimos mittit qui nocturnis hostes adgrediantur insidiis aut explorent iter aut praesidium loco deiciant. Nemo eorum qui exeunt dicit 'male de me imperator mervit', sed 'bene iudicavit'.

Seneca the Younger Moral Essays

De Providentia (On Providence), 4.8, translated by Aubrey Stewart
Moral Essays

Men, God, Hostility, Health

“Not for naught had he gained access into darksome cults, had harkened to the grisly whispers of the votaries of Skelos under midnight trees, and read the forbidden iron-bound books of Vathelos the Blind.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Black Colossus" (1933)

Books, Tree, Reading

“I stood stonelike at midnight, suspended in my masquerade.
I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigade.
I was open to pain and crossed by the rain and I walked on a crooked crutch.
I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and came out with my soul untouched.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Growin' Up"
Song lyrics, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973)

Pain, Soul, Night

“When confronted by midnight in the social order we have in the past turned to science for help. And little wonder! On so many occasions science has saved us. When we were in the midnight of physical limitation and material inconvenience, science lifted us to the bright morning of physical and material comfort. When we were in the midnight of crippling ignorance and superstition, science brought us to the daybreak of the free and open mind. When we were in the midnight of dread plagues and diseases, science, through surgery, sanitation, and the wonder drugs, ushered in the bright day of physical health, thereby prolonging our lives and making for greater security and physical well-being. How naturally we turn to science in a day when the problems of the world are so ghastly and ominous. But alas! science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

A Knock on Midnight http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/multimediaentry/doc_a_knock_at_midnight/ 1960s, Strength to Love (1963)

Health, Age, World, Disease

“Seek for a shadow that drifts before a cloud that hides the moon; grope in the dark for a cobra; follow a mist that steals out of the swamp at midnight.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Black Stranger" (1953)

“When every worldly thought is utterly forsaken,
Comes the starry midnight, felt by life's gifted few;
Then will the spirit from its earthly sleep awaken
To a being more intense, more spiritual and true.
So doth the soul awaken,
Like that youth to night's fair queen!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1837-1) (Vol. 49) Subjects for Pictures. Third Series. I. The Awakening of Endymion
The Monthly Magazine

Life, Youth, Soul, Sleep

“But my chief objection to all these measures is that they do violence to the class psychology of the worker and cannot be successfully inculcated as mass doctrine. The very nature of these tactics adapts them to guerilla warfare, to the bomb planter, the midnight assassin; and such warfare. in this country, at least plays directly into the hands of the enemy.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Sound Socialist Tactics (1912)

Nature, Country

“Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life! -
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin fine upon the shore!”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

St. 50. Modern Love http://www.ev90481.dial.pipex.com/Meredith/modern_love.htm (1862)

Life, Soul, Horse

“From a magician's midnight sleeve
the radio-singers
distribute all their love-songs
over the dew-wet lawns.”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

Poem: Late Air

Love

“If I saw Mr. Haughey buried at midnight at a crossroads, with a stake driven through his heart – politically speaking – I should continue to wear a clove of garlic round my neck, just in case.”

Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917–2008) Irish politician

The Observer, October 10, 1982

Heart

“Midnight, when the monotonous tick-tock of diurnal progress is for one throbbing moment replaced by the cool but smokey honk of a saxophone, alternately seductive and threatening. Midnight. The black growth on the clock face that has to be biopsied every twenty-four hours to see whether it is malignant or benign.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

“I am a bird from mountains you don't know.
My throat feels itchy—so I start to chirp
when sings the morning wind among the leaves,
when dreams the moon at midnight in the blue.
Perched on a branch, the bird longs for its brook—
it will break into song and not know why.
Its ditties cannot make the fruits grow ripe;
its carols cannot help the flowers bloom.
It's profitless to sing, and yet the bird
will burst its throat and heart to sing its best.”

Xuân Diệu (1916–1985) Vietnamese poet

"Foreword to a book of poems", in An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, trans. Huỳnh Sanh Thông (Yale University Press, 1996), ISBN 978-0300064100

Dreams, Feeling, Mountain, Flowers

“The hallmarks of a regime which flouts the rule of law are, alas, all too familiar: the midnight knock on the door, the sudden disappearance, the show trial, the subjection of prisoners to genetic experiment, the confession extracted by torture, the gulag and the concentration camp, the gas chamber, the practice of genocide or ethnic clansing, the waging of aggressive war. The list is endless, Better to put up with some choleric judges and greedy lawyers.”

Thomas Bingham, Baron Bingham of Cornhill (1933–2010) British judge

The Rule of Law (2010), Ch. 1 : The Importance of the Rule of Law

War, Law

“History knew a midnight, which we may estimate at about the year 1000 A. D., when the human race lost the arts and sciences even to the memory. The last twilight of paganism was gone, and yet the new day had not begun. Whatever was left of culture in the world was found only in the Saracens, and a Pope eager to learn studied in disguise in their unversities, and so became the wonder of the West. At last Christendom, tired of praying to the dead bones of the martyrs, flocked to the tomb of the Saviour Himself, only to find for a second time that the grave was empty and that Christ was risen from the dead. Then mankind too rose from the dead. It returned to the activities and the business of life; there was a feverish revival in the arts and in the crafts. The cities flourished, a new citizenry was founded. Cimabue rediscovered the extinct art of painting; Dante, that of poetry. Then it was, also, that great courageous spirits like Abelard and Saint Thomas Aquinas dared to introduce into Catholicism the concepts of Aristotelian logic, and thus founded scholastic philosophy. But when the Church took the sciences under her wing, she demanded that the forms in which they moved be subjected to the same unconditioned faith in authority as were her own laws. And so it happened that scholasticism, far from freeing the human spirit, enchained it for many centuries to come, until the very possibility of free scientific research came to be doubted. At last, however, here too daylight broke, and mankind, reassured, determined to take advantage of its gifts and to create a knowledge of nature based on independent thought. The dawn of the day in history is know as the Renaissance or the Revival of Learning.”

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) German mathematician

"Über Descartes Leben und seine Methode die Vernunft Richtig zu Leiten und die Wahrheit in den Wissenschaften zu Suchen," "About Descartes' Life and Method of Reason.." (Jan 3, 1846) C. G. J. Jacobi's Gesammelte werke Vol. 7 https://books.google.com/books?id=_09tAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA309 p.309, as quoted by Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930).

Life, World, Faith, Law

“I've thought upon thy brow when Night
Threw o'er my pallet her summer moonlight,
And I have looked on the midnight sky
To catch the depth and light of thy eye;
I painted from these and from memory,
For I could not paint when I looked on thee.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

28th April 1824) Raphael Showing his Mistress her Portrait By Mr. Brockedon. (British Gallery.
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Light, Memory, Summer, Painting

“I walked until midnight in the storm, then I went home and took a sauna for an hour and a half. It was all clear. I listened to my heart and saw if there were any signs of my destiny in the sky, and there were none — there were just snowflakes.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Recounting a "walk in the snow" at a news conference announcing his resignation (29 February 1984)[citation needed]

Home, Heart

“The stag at eve had drunk his fill,
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartney's hazel shade.”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Canto I, stanza 1. The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)

Dance

“Clara:
I will speak softly, till our gathered strength
Finds in its union voice. Ah, no delay!
The tyranny that dared to fetter wears
A midnight dagger.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Translations, From the German

“That children dream not the first half year, that men dream not in some countries, with many more, are unto me sick men's dreams, dreams out of the Ivory gate, and visions before midnight.”

Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English polymath

On Dreams

Men, Children, Dreams, Country

“T was night, but night which the imperial moon,
Regal in her full beauty, turn'd to noon,
But still the noon of midnight; though the ray
Was clear and bright, it was not that of day;”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Golden Violet - The Child of the Sea
The Golden Violet (1827)

Beauty, Night

“But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”

Jack London book Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild (1903)

Love, Books, Sleep, Time

“The dark corridor of that Central Avenue Hotel, the sinister Negro, the black room and the hopheads, and now the girl who loved a man who hated her. It was all of the same cloth, perverse, drugged in fascinating ugliness. Midnight on Temple Street, a can of marijuana between us. She lay there, her long fingers dangling to the carpet, waiting, listless, tired.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Love, Hate, Girl, Waiting

“Afternoon’s the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime …”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

Time

“Let's do it in the mornin'
Sweet breeze in the summer time.
Feeling your sweet face
All laid up next to mine.
Sweet love in the midnight;
Good sleep, come mornin' light.
No worries 'bout nothin';
Just gettin' good, just gettin' good
Just gettin' good love.”

Curtis Mayfield (1942–1999) American singer, songwriter, and record producer

Let's Do It Again, performed by Staple Singers, from Let's Do It Again (1975).
Song lyrics

Love, Feeling, Sleep, Light

“Midnight is a wonderful thing in a vast city—and midnight was upon Vienna. The shops were closed, the windows darkened, and the streets deserted—strange that where so much of life was gathered together there could be such deep repose; yet nothing equals the stillness of a great town at night. Perhaps it is the contrast afforded by memory that makes this appear yet more profound. In the lone valley, and in the green forest, there is quiet even at noon—quiet, at least, broken by sounds belonging alike to day and night. The singing of the bee and the bird, or the voice of the herdsman carolling some old song of the hills—these may be hushed; but there is still the rustle of the leaves, the wind murmuring in the long grass, and the low perpetual whisper of the pine. But in the town—the brick and mortar have no voices of their own. Nature is silent—her soft, sweet harmonies are hushed in the great human tumult—man, and man only, is heard. Through many hours of the twenty-four, the ocean of existence rolls on with a sound like thunder—a thousand voices speak at once. The wheels pass and re-pass over the stones—music, laughter, anger, the words of courtesy and of business, mingle together—the history of a day is the history of all time. The annals of life but repeat themselves.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Life, Music, History, Business

“Corey's coming, no more sad stories coming
My midnight-moonlight-morning-glory's coming aren't you girl?
And like I told you, when she holds you
She enfolds you in her world.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Corey's Coming
Song lyrics, On the Road to Kingdom Come (1976)

World, Sadness, Girl

“Spirit of the midnight dream,
What is now upon thy wing?
Earth sleeps in the moonlight beam;
O'er that sleep what wilt thou fling?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(31st March 1827) The Spirit of Dreams
The London Literary Gazette, 1827

Dreams, Sleep

“Let the modern eye look earnestly on that old midnight hour in St. Edmundsbury Church, shining yet on us, ruddy-bright, through the depths of seven hundred years; and consider mournfully what our Hero-worship once was, and what it now is!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“It was tough going to school in the day and traveling to games at night. Sometimes we would get back about midnight. I never went to dances or hung around with girls. Hockey was the first thing.”

Guy Lafleur (1951) Canadian ice hockey player

Quoted in Kevin Shea, "One on One with Guy Lafleur," http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep198802.htm Legends of Hockey.net (2003-03-16)

School, Travel, Girl, Game

“What is the world that lies around our own? Shadowy, unsubstantial, and wonderful are the viewless elements, peopled with spirits powerful and viewless as the air which is their home. From the earth's earliest hour, the belief in the supernatural has been universal. At first the faith was full of poetry; for, in those days, the imagination walked the earth even as did the angels, shedding their glory around the children of men. The Chaldeans watched from their lofty towers the silent beauty of night — they saw the stars go forth on their appointed way, and deemed that they bore with them the mighty records of eternity. Each separate planet shone on some mortal birth, and as its aspect was for good or for evil, such was the aspect of the fortunes that began beneath its light. Those giant watch-towers, with their grey sages, asked of the midnight its mystery, and held its starry roll to be the chronicle of this breathing world. Time past on, angels visited the earth no more, and the divine beliefs of young imagination grew earthlier. Yet poetry lingered in the mournful murmur of the oaks of Dodona, and in the fierce war song of the flying vultures, of whom the Romans demanded tidings of conquest. But prophecy gradually sank into divination, and it is a singular proof of the extent both of human credulity and of curiosity, to note the various methods that have had the credit of forestalling the future. From the stars to a tea-cup is a fall indeed”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Men, War, Children, People

“It was the calm and silent night!
Seven hundred years and fifty-three
Had Rome been growing up to might,
And now was queen of land and sea.
No sound was heard of clashing wars,
Peace brooded o’er the hushed domain;
Apollo, Pallas, Jove, and Mars
Held undisturbed their ancient reign
In the solemn midnight,
Centuries ago.”

Alfred Domett (1811–1887) Prime Minister of New Zealand

Christmas Hymn (1833), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

War, Peace, Sea, Night

“We believe that this administration represents Israel inside America. Take the sensitive ministries such as the Ministry of Exterior and the Ministry of Defense and the CIA, you will find that the Jews have the upper hand in them. They make use of America to further their plans for the world, especially the Islamic world. American presence in the Gulf provides support to the Jews and protects their rear. And while millions of Americans are homeless and destitute and live in abject poverty, their government is busy occupying our land and building new settlements and helping Israel build new settlements in the point of departure for our Prophet's midnight journey to the seven heavens. America throws her own sons in the land of the two Holy Mosques for the sake of protecting Jewish interests.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

1990s, ABC interview (1998)

World, Departure, Business, Support

“Under the midnight sun, despair acquires the intensity of sex, insomnia the vehemence of art.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 12, “Father” (p. 337)

Art, Sex, Sun, Despair

“The moon walks east of midnight,
The sun walks west of noon.
And though I love you, sweetheart,
I will not sing your tune.”

Tanith Lee book East of Midnight

Source: East of Midnight (1977), Chapter 2, “Full Moon” (p. 24; often repeated)

Love, Singing, Sun

“All fathers and mothers, in all societies, want their children to be educated, and live free from poverty and violence. No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Children, People, Secret, Education

“Turn on your side and bear the day to me
Beloved, sceptre-struck, immured
In the glass wall of sleep. Slowly
Uncloud the borealis of your eye
And show your iceberg secrets, your midnight prizes
To the green-eyed world and to me.”

George Barker (1913–1991) British poet

Turn on your side and bear the day to me

Secret, World, Sleep

“Schumann’s Kreisleriana: No other cycle among Schumann’s great works so perfectly expresses the sensation of dark nocturnal things, of chaos, lurking in the background. The last piece of this collection shows this particularly well. Like skeletons on horseback, shadowy figures flit before us in a soft, sustained rhythm; in the middle section horn-calls enliven the scene with visions of knightly strength and nobility, but at the end the figures vanish ghost - like into night and mystery. Looking into the first volume of Schumann’s diaries we find ‘Midnight Piece,’ a prose passage which provides moving, indeed alarming evidence of his perilously depressive mental state. It contains elements of a highly personal kind which memorably convey the particular quality of his imagination, mortally cold and never far from visions of death. It could have served perfectly as a model for the final, disturbing piece in the Kreisleriana set.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Death, Imagination, Personality, Night

“We went to Kyoto -- back to Japan -- to work in the Matsuo Tiasha shrine which Sei Shonagon had visited regularly. I couldn't give up such an opportunity. I was also a little homesick. We didn't finish walking the cat-walk until midnight when all the audience had gone. I didn't mind -- Sei Shonagon had watched the moon rise in that garden a thousand years ago -- I could have walked up and down that path all night long.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Nagiko's journal for Nov 9 1997
The Pillow Book

Cats, Night

“What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Introduction http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

“Comus and his midnight crew.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

Ode for Music http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=ocmu (1769), line 2

“In any case, I am usually in bed by midnight.”

Vladislav Doronin (1962) European businessman

Interview with FT.com https://howtospendit.ft.com/travel/202189-vladislav-doronin-s-perfect-weekend-in-miami

“In a paper belonging to the Spectator there is a short description of a country wake. "I found," says the author, "a ring of cudgel-players, who were breaking one another's heads in order to make some impression on their mistresses' hearts."…to this he adds another curious pastime, as a kind of Christmas gambol, which he had seen also; that is, a yawning match for a Cheshire cheese; the sport began about midnight, when the whole company were disposed to be drowsy; and he that yawned the widest, and at the same time most naturally, so as to produce the greatest number of yawns from the spectators, obtained the cheese.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 369
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Country wakes

Nature, Sport, Time, Heart

“We spend our midday sweat, our midnight oil;
We tire the night in thought, the day in toil.”

Francis Quarles (1592–1644) English poet

Book II, no. 2.
Emblems (1635)

Night

“No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50 thousand years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward — and so will space.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Rice University speech

History, Star, Problem, Light

“There is a splendour in my name hidden and glorious, as the sun of midnight is ever the son.”

Aleister Crowley book The Book of the Law

III:74.
The Book of the Law (1904)

Sun

“While we are laid on the battle plain,
Drenched to the skin by the midnight rain,
Pleasant dreams may thy slumber crown,
As thou sinkest to rest amid silk and down :
But shame beside thy pillow stand!
A German maid shall kiss thee not,
A German song rejoice thee not,
And German wine shall warm thee not!
He who has strength to wield a brand,
Let him draw it now for his father-land!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette (3rd January 1835) Versions from the German (First Series.) - 'The Gathering' — Koerner.
Translations, From the German

Dreams, Kiss, Wine, Drawing

“I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines … We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Letter to Elizabeth Cameron (22 January 1899), in J. C. Levinson et al. eds., The Letters of Henry Adams, Volume IV: 1892–1899 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1988), p. 670

Thinking

“But most, thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”

William Blake London

London, st. 4
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)

Marriage, Youth, Tear

“I am the midnight watchman down at Miller's Tool and Die.
And I watch the metal rusting, and I watch the time go by.
A week ago at the diner I stopped to get a bite.
And this here lovely lady she sat two seats from my right.
And Lord, Lord, Lord she was alright.
Oh she was so damned beautiful that she'd warm a winter's frost.
But she was long past lonely, and well nigh unto lost.
Now I'm not much of a mover, or a pick-em-up easy guy,
But I decided to glide on over, and give her one good try.
And Lord, Lord, Lord she was worth a try.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Better Place to Be
Song lyrics, Sniper and Other Love Songs (1972)

Love, Beauty, Guy, Winter

“The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult showings. Midnight is not late enough.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-beyond-1998 of The Beyond (3 July 1998) Reviews, Half-star reviews

Country

“I stood on the bridge at midnight,
As the clocks were striking the hour,
And the moon rose o'er the city,
Behind the dark church-tower.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Bridge

The Bridge, st. 1 (1845).

“the hollow voice
Of that old crone, the only living sound;
Her face, on which mortality has writ
Its closing, with the wan and bony hand,
Raised like a spectre's—and yourself the while,
Cold from the midnight chill, and white with fear,
Your large blue eyes darker and larger grown
With terror's chain'd attention, and your breath
Suppress'd for very earnestness.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Ancestress (Spoken by Jaromir to Bertha)
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Fear

“It may not be factually true that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the saying has passed into common usage because the image has the ring of truth to it. Time and time again, the good and decent common people have manned the walls of the city, and have been ready to give their lives in its defense, only to discover too late that some silk-robed (expletive) has snuck out of the palace at midnight and thrown open the gates to the barbarians outside.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

The Undefended City https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/09/undefended-city-bill-whittle/, National Review (19 September 2008) 2000s

People, Truth, Time

“She was tall beyond the ordinary height of woman, but stately in her grace as the ideal of a queen and the reality of a swan. Her arms and feet were bare, but for the gems which encircled them. A white robe swept around her in folds gathered at the waist by a golden girdle inscribed with signs and characters. Her hair was singularly thick, and of that purple blackness seen on the grape and the neck of the raven — black, with a sort of azure bloom upon it. It was fastened in large folds, which went several times round the head, and these were adorned with jewels and precious stones, like a midnight lighted with stars. Her complexion was a pale pure olive, perfectly colourless, but delicate as that of a child. Her mouth was the only spot where the rose held dominion, and lips of richer crimson never opened to the morning.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Star, Reality, Light, Time

“Dark underbelly to all of this. Sarajevo, where the [Olympic] Games were held in '84, is under threat. The UN and NATO have ordered the Serbs to have their big guns off the surrounding hills by midnight, February 20. All the love that is being manifested in these Games was once manifested in Sarajevo. The cameras pan across the great stadium — bombed out, an empty shell. […] Ten years ago, all that glory gleamed in the center of what is now a cemetery for the dead killed in a ferocious attack. What sense does it make?”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Bone: Dying into Life (2000), p. 94

Love, Game, Sense, Dead

“I approached the confines of death, and having trod on the threshold of Proserpine, I returned therefrom, being borne through all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining with its brilliant light; and I approached the presence of the Gods beneath, and the Gods of heaven, and stood near, and worshipped them.”
Accessi confinium mortis et calcato Proserpinae limine per omnia vectus elementa remeavi, nocte media vidi solem candido coruscantem lumine, deos inferos et deos superos accessi coram et adoravi de proximo.

Apuleius book The Golden Ass

Bk. 11, ch. 23; pp. 239-40.
Describing initiation into the mysteries of Isis.
Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass)

Death, God, Light, Sun

“I think what's happening now is people want to forget. There was Vietnam, there was Watergate, there was Iran – we were beaten, we were hustled, and then we were humiliated. And I think people got a need to feel good about the country they live in. But what's happening, I think, is that that need – which is a good thing – is gettin' manipulated and exploited. And you see the Reagan reelection ads on TV – you know: "It's morning in America." And you say, well, it's not morning in Pittsburgh. It's not morning above 125th Street in New York. It's midnight, and, like, there's a bad moon risin'. And that's why when Reagan mentioned my name in New Jersey, I felt it was another manipulation, and I had to disassociate myself from the president's kind words.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

Rolling Stone magazine (December 1984)

People, Feeling, Thinking, Country

“There rise her timeless capitals of Empires daily born,
Whose plinths are laid at midnight, and whose streets are packed at morn;
And here come hired youths and maids that feign to love or sin
In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Naaman's Song http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/LimitsRenewals/naamansong.html, Stanza 2. Other works

Love, Youth

“Hence, loathèd Melancholy,
Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born,
In Stygian cave forlorn,
'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 1

“I have no doubt that the Romans planned the time-table of their days far better than we do. They rose before the sun at all seasons. Except in wartime we never see the dawn. Sometimes we see sunset. The message of sunset is sadness; the message of dawn is hope. The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night. We were not made by Nature to work, or even play, from eight o’clock in the morning till midnight. We throw a strain upon our system which is unfair and improvident. For every purpose of business or pleasure, mental or physical, we ought to break our days and our marches into two.”

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

Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 6 (Cuba).

Pleasure, Sadness, Hope, Business

“One rainy day in Cologne on the Rhine, the catalogue of a teaching aids company caught my attention. It was illustrated with models of all kind – mathematical, geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical, paleontological, and so forth- elements of of such a diverse nature that the absurdity of the collection confused the eye and mind, producing hallucinations and lending the objects depicted new and rapidly changing meanings. I suddenly felt my 'visionary faculties' so intensified that I began seeing the newly emerged objects against a new background. To capture it, a little paint or a few lines were enough, a horizon, a sky, a wooden floor, that sort of things. My hallucination had been fixed. Now it was a matter of interpreting the hallucination in a few words or sentences Such as: 'Above the clouds midnight passes. Above midnight glides the invisible bird of day..”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Biographical Notes. Tissue of truth, Tissue of Lies', 1929; as cited in Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Munich, Prestel, 1991, p. 290
1910 - 1935

Mathematics, Nature, Bird, Change

“Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll,
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing.
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds,
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing.
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight,
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight,
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night,
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Chimes of Freedom

Freedom, Fight, Night

“In certain tantric rituals the candidate is first beaten by his guru, hashish forced down him, and he is taken at midnight to a dark cemetery for sacred sexual intercourse. Thus he achieves union with his god.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: Liber Null & Psychonaut (1987), p. 35

God

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Source: Funeral Blues (1936)

Love

“There, where the cross in hoary ruin nods,
And weeping yews o'ershade the lettered stones,
While midnight silence wraps these dark abodes,
And soothes me wand'ring o'er my kindred bones,
Let kindled fancy view the glorious morn,
When from the bursting graves the dust shall rise,
All nature smiling, and, by angels borne,
Messiah's cross, far blazing o'er the skies.”

William Julius Mickle (1734–1788) British writer

Pollio: an Elegy (written 1762; published 1765)

Smile, Angels, Nature, Silence

“The story of widows and orphans now wandering amid the ravines of the rural counties of my native state seeking protection and maintenance from others who are yet unable, on account of their own poverty, to grant them aid. I could dwell upon the sorrows of poor women, with their helpless infants, cast upon the world, homeless and destitute, deprived of their natural protectors by the red hand of the midnight assassin. I could appeal to you, members upon this floor, as husbands and fathers, to picture to yourselves the desolation of your own happy firesides should you be suddenly snatched away from your loved ones. Think of gray-haired men, whose fourscore years are almost numbered, the venerated heads of peaceful households, without warning murdered for political opinion's sake.”

Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician

1871, Speech on the the Ku Klux Klan Bill of 1871 (1 April 1871)

Love, Women, Men, Happiness

“Mournfully, oh, mournfully,
The midnight wind doth sigh,
Like some sweet plaintive melody
Of ages long gone by.”

William Motherwell (1797–1835) British writer

The Midnight Wind.

Age

“I stayed in bed all day yesterday, for instance, while she [Elizabeth Taylor] spent the entire day until well after midnight sitting in the main room, gossiping, etc. And, of course, inevitably sipping away at the drinks… What is more frightening is that she has become bored with everything in life.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

In "Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: The Love Letters. How drinking cocooned them from pressure of fame. Without it, they couldn't even make love."

Life, Drink

“The night room heaves a sigh, yes Heaves, a Sigh — old-fashioned comical room, oh me I'm hopeless, born a joker never change, flirting away through the mirrorframe in something green-striped, pantalooned, and ruffled — meantime though, it is quaint, most rooms today hum you know, have been known also to "breathe," yes even wait in hushed expectancy and that ought to be the rather sinister tradition here, long slender creatures, heavy perfume and capes in rooms assailed by midnight, pierced with spiral stairways, blue-petaled pergolas, an ambience in which no one, however provoked or out of touch, my dear young lady, ever, Heaves, a Sigh. It is not done.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Fashion, Change, Waiting, Night

“At midnight they can come into your room and take you away. They can put a black hood on you, take you to a secret place and interrogate you, trying to stop what you’re doing. They threaten people, your family, saying: 'Your children won’t find jobs.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, China’s Censorship Can Never Defeat the Internet, 2012

Children, People, Secret, Family

“The moon has set,
And the Pleiades.
Midnight.
The hour has gone by.
I sleep alone.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Frag. 72
Translations, Sappho's Poems and Fragments (2002)

Sleep

“Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed… I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.26 On being at home in Harlech in 1919. During the First World War, the mental effects of war on the fighting men were called shell shock or neurasthenia — or dismissed altogether as cowardice. Graves describes very clearly symptoms of what would now be seen as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

People, Travel, Sleep, Time

“876. One houre's sleepe before midnight is worth three after.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Sleep

“[Talking about "The First Singles Apartment"] They're all furnished pretty much the same way. In your bedroom, you have the mattress on the floor, protected by a mountain of dirty clothes, milk crates for night stands, lava lamp with a permanent glob in the bottom, stolen road sign on the wall, a blanket for a curtain. Out in the hall it was the mystery stain on the carpet, Budwiser mirror on the wall. Out on the balcony it was the rusted-out Hibachi grill, plant with no leaves on it, bike with no chain on it. In the den you had the spool. If you get one of those, you'll be like "it's coffee table time!" Next to that, the $9,000.00 stereo. We're going hungry, but we've got tunes! That was the stereo, you could turn it on after midnight and make the people down the street wet the bed. And the beanbag chair with duct tape on it to keep the stuff from fallin' out of it.”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

You Might Be a Redneck If… (1993)

People, Way, Mountain, Coffee

“So in the midnight shadows of the grove did they two meet and draw nigh each other, awe-struck, like silent first or motionless cypresses, when the mad South wind hath not yet intertwined their boughs.”
Haud secus in mediis noctis nemoris que tenebris inciderant ambo attoniti iuxtaque subibant abietibus tacitis aut immotis cyparissis adsimiles, rapidus nondum quas miscuit Auster.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VII, Lines 403–406

Drawing, Madness

“Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

St. 22.
The Wreck of the Hesperus (1842)

Death, Christ

“The sands of time are sinking
The dawn of heaven breaks;
The summer morn I've sighed for,
The fair, sweet morn, awakes.
Dark, dark hath been the midnight,
But dayspring is at hand,
And glory, glory dwellth
In Immanuel's hand”

Anne Ross Cousin (1824–1906) Scottish musician and songwriter

Verse 1 Hymn 776 Baptist Hymnal.

Time, Summer

“It ain't like midnight and cigarette smoke.
It ain't like watered down whiskey and coke.
I guess some things just don't mix like you hope.
Like me and you.
And diamond rings and old barstools.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Diamond Rings and Old Barstools
Song lyrics, Sundown Heaven Town (2014)

Hope, Water

“O beauty of the midnight skies!
O mystery of each distant star!
O dreaming hours, whose magic lies
In rest and calm, with Day afar!
Thanks for the higher moods that wake
Our thoughtful and immortal part!—
Out on our life, could we not make
A spiritual temple of the heart?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Meditation
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Life, Beauty, Dreams, Star

“To Whom the Mornings stand for Nights,
What must the Midnights — be!”

Emily Dickinson To Whom the Mornings stand for Nights,

1095: To Whom the Mornings stand for Nights,
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)

Night

“He rolled in his bed, twisting the sheets, grappling with a problem years too big for him, awake in the night like a single sentinel on picket. And sometime after midnight, he slept, too, and then only the wind was awake, prying at the hotel and hooting in its gables under the bright gimlet gaze of the stars.”

Stephen King book The Shining

The Shining (1977)

Star, Problem, Night

“Nothing venture, nothing gain.
Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,
Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours
Weeping upon his bed has sate,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß

Wer nichts wagt, gerwinnt nichts.
Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß,
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend saß,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.
Bk. II, Ch. 13; translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786–1830)