Quotes about moonlight
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“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

“The numerous chimneys with their fantastic shapes rose grimly in the moonlight, like a strange band of goblin sentinels, perched of the roof to watch the mansion. The general effect was that of an ancient structure falling to decay, deserted by all inhabitants save the rats that gnawed the wainscot along the thick old walls. The door-plate that glittered on the faded door, half covered as it was with rust and verdigris, with its saintly name afforded the only signs of the actual occupation of Monk-hall by human beings: in all other respects it looked so desolate, so time-worn, so like a mausoleum for old furniture, and crumbling tapestry, for high-backed mahogany chairs, gigantic bedsteads, and strange looking mirrors, veiled in the thick folds of the spider's web.”

George Lippard (1822–1854) Novelist, journalist

The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall, part 1, chapter 7 "The Monks of Monk-Hall" (1844)

Time

“What beck'ning ghost, along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717), Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 1. Compare: "What gentle ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?", Ben Jonson, Elegy on the Lady Jane Pawlet.

“… absence is
The moonlight of affection;”

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

Canto II, II
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

““Tell me! What do you think of life? What do you think of ambition? What do you think of science, of learning, of love, of fame, of glory, of aspiration?”
“I think… that those are all very different things.”
“You are wrong. They are all one thing—a cunt.”
“Sir?”
“A cunt! Consider: The cunt is a nasty, ugly, filthy thing. Yet we desire it so greatly as to be willing to suffer any indignity to attain it. For the sake of it we labor and preen and whisper sugary words. We go to the theatre with flowers in our arms, climb over back walls by moonlight, write sonnets, jump out of windows with our trousers in our hands, give dangerous men their choice of weapons. We build love-nests for it sake, and cities, and civilizations. It is our all, our only, our ideal. It has created us and made us great. Such is life, such is ambition, such is science, learning, love, fame, glory, and aspiration. The Eternal Cunt,” he said significantly, “draws us onward.””

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 16, “The Wild Hunt” (p. 276)

Love, Life, Men, Flowers

“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away.”

Stephen Foster (1826–1864) American songwriter

Beautiful Dreamer, Firth, Pond & Co. (1862).

World, Beauty, Waiting

“Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“Oh, softest is the cheek's love-ray
When seen by moonlight hours
Other roses seek the day,
But blushes are night flowers.”

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

When Should Lover’s Breathe Their Vows from The London Literary Gazette (24th November 1821)
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Love, Flowers, Night

“As I looked round the clearing at the ranks of squatting warriors and the small isolated group of my own men, I knew that this moonlight meeting in unknown Africa with a savage potentate who hated Europeans was the realization of my boyhood dreams. I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying.”

Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) British explorer

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 146.

Men, Hate, Dreams, Hope

“To hide the wells from the beam of the sun,
She took the webs of silvery white
Herself had wove in the lone moonlight,
And threw them o'er, so that not one ray
Could lighten their depths with a glimpse of day;”

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

The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Sun

“Sometimes he stood in the center of the quad, looking at the five huge columns in front of Jesse Hall that thrust upward into the night out of the cool grass. … Grayish silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to him to represent the way of life he had embraced, as a temple represents a god.”

John Edward Williams book Stoner

Source: Stoner (1965), p. 15

Life, God, Way, Grass

“We must turn inwards to search deep within ourselves. “Is my heart still vibrant with life? Can I still experience the source of love and compassion within me? Does my heart still melt at the pain and sorrow of others? Have I cried along with those who are suffering? Have I really tried to wipe another’s tears to console them or given someone at least a single meal or a set of clothing?” Like this, we can honestly introspect. Then the soothing moonlight of compassion will spontaneously shine within our minds.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Compassion: The Only Way to Peace (2007)

Love, Life, Pain, Search

“A cry went up in the airy solitude of the high plains: 'Let's Murder the moonlight!' Some ran to nearby cascades; gigantic wheels were raised, and turbines transformed the rushing waters into magnetic pulses that rushed up wires, up high poles, up to shining, humming globes.
So it was that three hundred electric moons canceled with their rays of blinding mineral whiteness the ancient green queen of loves.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

1900's, Let's Murder the Moonlight!' (1909)
Source: Mario J. Valdés, ‎Daniel Javitch, ‎Alfred Owen Aldridge (1992) Comparative literary history as discourse, p. 313

Love, Solitude, Water, Cry

“The moonlight shown upon her as she lay back in my bed.
It was the kind of scene I only had imagined in my head.
I just could not believe it, to think that she was real.
And as I tried to tell her she said "Shhh.. I know just how you feel.
And if you want to come here with me, then that's all right with me.
'Cause I've been oh so lonely, lovin' someone is a better way to be.
anywhere's a better way to be."”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

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

Way, Feeling, Imagination, Thinking

“I say I can't thank you too much for the name 'Nocturne' as a title for my moonlights! You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me — besides it is really so charming and does so poetically say all that I want to say and no more than I wish.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Anderson and Koval, p. 186; as quoted on the English Wikipedia
posthumous published

Pleasure, Idea

“I'd like to see you out in the moonlight.
I'd like to kiss you way back in the sticks.
I'd like to walk you through a field of wildflowers.
And I'd like to check you for ticks.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

Ticks, written by Brad Paisley, Kelley Lovelace, and Tim Owens.
Song lyrics, 5th Gear (2007)

Way, Kiss

“The moods of the dark night skies are variously represented like soft black velvet, like the shining black of a scarab beetle, like the patina-ed surface of Indian-inked paper, soft blotting-paper soaked in dark blue ink for forty days, like a black cat's fur shining in moonlight…”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Cats, Mood, Night

“The cypress stood up like a church
That night we felt our love would hold,
And saintly moonlight seemed to search
And wash the whole world clean as gold;
The olives crystallized the vales'
Broad slopes until the hills grew strong:
The fireflies and the nightingales
Throbbed each to either, flame and song.
The nightingales, the nightingales.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

Bianca Among the Nightingales http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=3035&poem=127031, st. 1 (1862).

Love, World, Search, Strong

“The silence of a winter's night
brings memories I hold inside;
remembering a blue moonlight
upon the fallen snow.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Silence, Memory, Winter, Night

“The editor of this selection from Chopin’s Pianoforte Studies has, however, no such intention; on the contrary. he wishes to make some of them, which owing to their difficulty have hitherto remained unpopularised, more accessible, particularly to the amateur, by pointing out the way to their correct study. And thus, on the basis of the technical facility to be acquired through these pieces, to enable even the non-professional to enjoy a more intimate acquaintance with those works of the classical romanticist, which, though representing the best and most undying side of his genius, have found till now but a small, though daily increasing circle of admirers; for the “Ladies’-Chopin”, which for forty years has blossomed in the pale and sickly rays of dilettantism; the “talented, languishing, Polish youth” to whom the most modest place on the Parnassus of musical literature was denied by the amateurish criticism of German professors, is as little the genuine entire Chopin, as is the Beethoven of “Adelaide” and the “Moonlight Sonata”, the god of Symphony. Truly a span of time must yet elapse before the matured and manly Chopin, the author of the two Sonatas, the 3rd and 4th Scherzos, the 4th Ballade, the Polonaise in F# minor, the later Mazurkas and Nocturnes etc., will be completely and generally appreciated at his full worth. At the same time much may be done by preparing and clearing the way; and one of the best means towards this end is sifting the material, and replacing favourite and unimportant works, by those less known though more important.”

Hans von Bülow (1830–1894) German musician

Preface to Instructive ausgabe. Klavier-Etuden von Fr. Chopin, 1880.

God, Youth, Music, Way

“A moonlight traveler in Fancy’s land.”

Madison Cawein (1865–1914) poet from Louisville, Kentucky

Unqualified.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

Travel

“The trees that whisper in the evening
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
Sing a song of sorrow and grieving
Carried away by a moonlight shadow
All she saw was a silhouette of a gun
Far away on the other side
He was shot six times by a man on the run
And she couldn't find how to push trough
I stay, I pray, see you in heaven far away
I stay, I pray, see you in heaven one day…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Crises (1983)

Tree, Singing, Time

“The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding —
Riding — riding —
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.”

Alfred Noyes book The Highwayman

The Highwayman (1907)

Tree, Sea

“It was on his return journey that Pao-yü's father heard of the success and disappearance of his son. Torn by conflicting emotions he hurried on, in his haste to reach home and aid in unravelling the secret of Pao-yü's hiding-place. One moonlight night, his boat lay anchored alongside the shore, which a storm of the previous day had wrapped in a mantle of snow. He was sitting writing at a table, when suddenly, through the half-open door, advancing towards him over the bow of the boat, his silhouette sharply defined against the surrounding snow, he saw the figure of a shaven-headed Buddhist priest. The priest knelt down, and struck his head four times upon the ground, and then, without a word, turned back to join two other priests who were awaiting him. The three vanished as imperceptibly as they had come; before, indeed, the astonished father was able to realise that he had been, for the last time, face to face with Pao-yü!”

Herbert Giles book A History of Chinese Literature

"The Hung Lou Mêng", p. 383
A History of Chinese Literature (1901)

Secret, Home, Time, Success

“Late at night the horses stumble
Around the camp and I awake.
I lie on my elbow watching
Your beautiful sleeping face
Like a jewel in the moonlight.
If you are lucky and the
Nations let you, you will live
Far into the twenty-first
Century. I pick up the glass
And watch the Great Nebula
Of Andromeda swim like
A phosphorescent amoeba
Slowly around the Pole. Far
Away in distant cities
Fat-hearted men are planning
To murder you while you sleep.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

In Defense of the Earth (1956), The Great Nebula of Andromeda

Men, Lie, Beauty, Sleep

“Might have been the moonlight,
Caught up in the sparkle in your eyes.
So wicked and I know I should go slow but it's not in me to wait.Cause I'm alive and I'm on fire.
Shot like a starburst into the sky.
And the fury of desire it burns so bright electrifies
You light me up, you take me higher.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Loving You Is Easy
Song lyrics, Laws of Illusion (2010)

Light

“I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man. Little I knew at the time how big the moment was with destiny, or how often that face seen in the fitful moonlight would haunt my sleep and disturb my waking hours.”

John Buchan book Prester John

First lines
Prester John (1910)

Sleep, Time

“All, insubstantial, doomed to pass,
As moonlight mirrored in the water
Or flowers reflected in a glass.”

Cao Xueqin book Dream of the Red Chamber

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5

Flowers, Water

“The next higher level is to work, fight, and sometimes die for your own immediate family. This is the level at which six pounds of mother cat can be so fierce that she'll drive off a police dog. It is the level at which a father takes a moonlighting job to keep his kids in college — and the level at which a mother or father dives into a flood to save a drowning child … and it is still moral behavior even when it fails.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

The Pragmatics of Patriotism (1973)

Family, Dogs, Behavior, Cats

“Buttercup begins to wail as well. He circles me, just out of reach, as wave after wave of sobs racks my body, until eventually I fall unconscious. But he must understand. He must know that the unthinkable has happened and to survive will require previously unthinkable acts. Because hours later, when I come to in my bed, he's there in the moonlight. Crouched beside me, yellow eyes alert, guarding me from the night.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Katniss (p. 386)
The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)

Understanding, Night

“Electricity was a part of the world from its creation, and therefore my Electra is as old as Daylight or Moonlight, and equally beneficent to mortals and fairies alike.”

L. Frank Baum book Tik-Tok of Oz

Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)
Later Oz novels

World, Parting

“Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.”

Jean Paul book Titan

Titan (1800-3)

Life, Music, Night

“Meet me by moonlight alone,
And then I will tell you a tale
Must be told by the moonlight alone,
In the grove at the end of the vale!
You must promise to come, for I said
I would show the night-flowers their queen.
Nay, turn not away that sweet head,
'T is the loveliest ever was seen.”

J. Augustine Wade (1796–1845) Irish composer

Meet me by Moonlight, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Flowers, Night

“Virgil is serene and lovely like a marble Apollo in the moonlight; Homer is a beautiful, animated youth in the full sunlight with the wind in his hair.”

Helen Keller book The Story of My Life

Source: The Story of My Life (1903), Ch. 21

Love, Youth, Beauty, Animals

“In the fifteenth century Rāmachandra, in his Prakriyā-kaumudī, or "Moonlight of Method," endeavoured to make Pāṇini's grammar easier by a more practical arrangement of its matter. Bhaṭṭoji's Siddhānta-kaumudī (seventeenth century) has a similar aim; an abridgment of this work, the Laghu-kaumudī, by Varadarāja is commonly used as an introduction to the native system of grammar. Among non-Pāṇinean grammarians may be mentioned Chandra (about 600 A. D.), the pseudo-Çākaṭāyana (later than the Kāçikā), and, the most important, Hemachandra (12th century), author of a Prākrit grammar.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Appendix A History of Sanskrit Literature

“The half moon sailed high, sharp-winged shadows skimming across it, and the conical hills and the vine-shrouded trees washed silver-green under the moonlight had the look of a decaying city millennia after a great catastrophe.”

Lucius Shepard book Green Eyes

Source: Green Eyes (1984), Chapter 15, p. 192

Tree

“Hark! My ears are catching corncrake’s clicking,
Silver moonlight shines on cobhead corn;
Summer evening’s blessing me, enriching,
Valley’s wreaths of smoky slash and burn.
Neither joying I, nor grieve I, mournful;
But for forest’s darkness am I yearnful,
Rose-gilt clouds the day’s protracted ending,
Windy sleeping hill o’er all extending,
Fragrant twinflower, shortening, lingering shade;
These the things from which my heart-song’s made.

Lady June-July, for you I’m singing,
Great the silence of my ardent heart,
Merry music make, for faith is mounting,
Verdant wreath of oak eternal start.
Foolish errands now I’ll make no longer,
Fortune blessèd hands will grasp the stronger;
Rippled pool of circles now decreasing;
Time has ceased and weathervane is sleeping;
Stretches road at twilit end of day,
Bound for home unknown, I take its way.”

Eino Leino (1878–1926) Finnish poet and journalist

Faith, Music, Way, Home

“Here are 3 drawings that I have made for You. It will be satisfactory, if it will meet your expectation and what it is for [to make a painting]. The two landscapes are thoughts, but the one that suggests the moonlight is the castle at Doorenwaart in Gelderland. I also painted a painting of that subject which I enjoyed a lot in Amsterdam [because, purchased there by A. B. Roothaan there] (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Andreas Schelfhout (1787–1870) Dutch painter, etcher and lithographer

(original Dutch, citaat van Schelfhout, uit zijn brief:) Hierbij 3 teekeningen die ik voor UE. Vervaardigd hebt, het zal mij genoegelijk zijn, indien dezelve aan uwe verwachting en aan het [doel], waar voor zie dienen moeten [voor het maken van een schilderij], zullen beantwoorden. De 2 landschapjes zijn gedachten, maar het gene dat het maanlicht voorsteld, is het kasteel te Doorenwaart in Gelderland. Ik heb ook van dat zelve onderwerp een schilderij geschilderd waar van ik veel genoege gehad heb te Amsterdam [aangekocht door A. B. Roothaan aldaar]
Quote of Schelfhout in his letter to , 2 Dec. 1823; as cited in Andreas Schelfhout - landschapschilder in Den Haag, Cyp Quarles van Ufford, Primavera Pers, (ISBN 978-90-5997-066-3), Leiden, p. 49

Drawing, Painting

“Ach! I know. If I were to play the Pathetique or the Moonlight Sonata for the high judges, they would let me off. But my defense unfortunately will not be musical.”

Walther Funk (1890–1960) German economist and politician

To Leon Goldensohn, March 31, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004 - Page 82

Music

“One kiss, my bonny sweetheart; I'm after a prize tonight,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light.
Yet if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.”

Alfred Noyes book The Highwayman

The Highwayman (1907)

Way, Hell, Kiss, Light

“Watching for a spark
It's a moonlight show
Reaching through the dark
Do you have to go?”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Discovery (1984)

“Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p

“Yet the moonlight is the sunlight and the sun himself will pass.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

Source: Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Line 182

Sun

“Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 133–134

Happiness, Children, People, World

“Her confusion put him at ease and he forgot to be shy; besides, even the shyest of men can sometimes be quite audacious in moonlight.”

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) Canadian fiction writer

Source: Rainbow Valley (1919), Ch. 13

Men

“Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, — to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
Preface to the Second Edition (1869)
Essays in Criticism (1865)

Truth, Age, Beauty, Perfection

“Homeless, homeless,
Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Homeless
Song lyrics, Graceland (1986)

Sleep

“If only I could fly away
Revel in the moonlight
Try to find a good life
Find a way to break the chains
Find a way to break the chains
Struggle just to hear the call
It's easy now, easy now
Heaven is a mile away
I'll burn it all and leave today”

Example (musician) (1982) English rapper and singer

"Break the Chains" (song), with Rationale (Tinashé Fazakerley) <br class="br"> ("Break the Chains" on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvosF7mbrnE <br class="br">Studio albums, Some Nights Last for Days (2020)

Life, Way, Flying

“A letter to the moonlight,
If you come, then bring my peace with you, which is lost somewhere. Bring with you my immense love, which lights up my life, I will imprison you in these eyes, even if you want to go, you will not be able to return.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Love, Life, Peace, Light

“To the moonlight that is visiting me tonight, As a gift, I want to give my loving heart to you. Before the arrival, I want to decorate my courtyard with flowers. I want to lay stars in her path, so that the journey from the sky to the earth becomes easy for her and and I want to spend the whole night looking at her.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Love, Star, Flowers, Heart