Quotes about morning
page 6

Pete Hamill photo
Franz Kafka photo

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.”

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
First lines
Variant translation (by David Wyllie): One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
Source: The Metamorphosis (1915)

Steven Pressfield photo

“Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

William Goldman photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Libba Bray photo
Robert Frost photo
Lin Yutang photo
Margaret Atwood photo
Victor Hugo photo
Jonathan Maberry photo
T.S. Eliot photo

“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Source: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Others

Helen Oyeyemi photo
Louisa May Alcott photo
Susanna Clarke photo
Rick Riordan photo
David Levithan photo
Jonathan Franzen photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Rick Riordan photo
Maya Angelou photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Glen Cook photo
Anaïs Nin photo
Charles Bukowski photo
Ernest Hemingway photo

“There is nowhere morning does not go.”

Leah Hager Cohen American writer

Source: Glass, Paper, Beans: Revolutions on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things

Raymond Carver photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

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

Variant: In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.
Source: Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

Susan Elizabeth Phillips photo
Junot Díaz photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Pablo Neruda photo
Laurell K. Hamilton photo
Dogen photo
Alain de Botton photo
Jennifer Weiner photo
Lois Lowry photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Maureen Johnson photo

“It was clearly one of those mornings when I was particularly American.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Thomas Hood photo
Charlotte Brontë photo
Michael Badnarik photo
Dido photo
William Mulock photo
Sarada Devi photo
James Thomson (B.V.) photo
Pat Condell photo
Nicholas Rowe photo

“At length the morn and cold indifference came.”

Act i, scene 1. Compare: "But with the morning cool reflection came", Sir Walter Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate, chap. iv. Scott also quotes this in his notes to "The Monastery", chapter iii, note 11; and with "calm" substituted for "cool" in "The Antiquary", chapter v.; and with "repentance" for "reflection" in "Rob Roy", chapter xii.
The Fair Penitent (1703)

William Jennings Bryan photo
Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan photo
Bob Dylan photo

“I believe in you even on the morning after.”

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

Song lyrics, Slow Train Coming (1979), I Believe in You

Radhanath Swami photo

“Lying down to sleep on the earthen riverbank, I thought, Vrindavan is attracting my heart like no other place. What is happening to me? Please reveal Your divine will. With this prayer, I drifted off to sleep.
Before dawn, I awoke to the ringing of temple bells, signaling that it was time to begin my journey to Hardwar. But my body lay there like a corpse. Gasping in pain, I couldn’t move. A blazing fever consumed me from within, and under the spell of unbearable nausea, my stomach churned. Like a hostage, I lay on that riverbank. As the sun rose, celebrating a new day, I felt my life force sinking. Death that morning would have been a welcome relief. Hours passed.
At noon, I still lay there. This fever will surely kill me, I thought.
Just when I felt it couldn’t get any worse, I saw in the overcast sky something that chilled my heart. Vultures circled above, their keen sights focused on me. It seemed the fever was cooking me for their lunch, and they were just waiting until I was well done. They hovered lower and lower. One swooped to the ground, a huge black and white bird with a long, curving neck and sloping beak. It stared, sizing up my condition, then jabbed its pointed beak into my ribcage. My body recoiled, my mind screamed, and my eyes stared back at my assailant, seeking pity. The vulture flapped its gigantic wings and rejoined its fellow predators circling above. On the damp soil, I gazed up at the birds as they soared in impatient circles. Suddenly, my vision blurred and I momentarily blacked out. When I came to, I felt I was burning alive from inside out. Perspiring, trembling, and gagging, I gave up all hope.
Suddenly, I heard footsteps approaching. A local farmer herding his cows noticed me and took pity. Pressing the back of his hand to my forehead, he looked skyward toward the vultures and, understanding my predicament, lifted me onto a bullock cart. As we jostled along the muddy paths, the vultures followed overhead. The farmer entrusted me to a charitable hospital where the attendants placed me in the free ward. Eight beds lined each side of the room. The impoverished and sadhu patients alike occupied all sixteen beds. For hours, I lay unattended in a bed near the entrance. Finally that evening the doctor came and, after performing a series of tests, concluded that I was suffering from severe typhoid fever and dehydration. In a matter-of-fact tone, he said, “You will likely die, but we will try to save your life.””

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

Republished on The Journey Home website.
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Heidi Klum photo

“I'm a very driven person. I'm always going after my goals. You just get up in the morning and kick yourself in the butt. I'd like to show people that they can have that same drive to go where they want to go. It's up to you and not to anybody else.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Quoted in Parade Magazine 10 July 2008 http://www.parade.com/celebrity/celebrity-parade/archive/pc_0194.html.

James Taylor photo
Conor Oberst photo
Dorothy Day photo
Gyles Brandreth photo

“I get to my desk at eight in the morning and I leave it at seven in the evening and I just work away. I'm a work machine.”

Gyles Brandreth (1948) British writer, broadcaster and former Member of Parliament

WhatsonStage interview, 2010

Warren Farrell photo
Jeremy Clarkson photo
Anthony Bourdain photo
Jane Austen photo
Amir Taheri photo

“When I asked Bhutto what he thought of Assad, he described the Syrian leader as “The Levanter.” Knowing that, like himself, I was a keen reader of thrillers, the Pakistani Prime Minister knew that I would get the message. However, it was only months later when, having read Eric Ambler’s 1972 novel The Levanter that I understood Bhutto’s one-word pen portrayal of Hafez Al-Assad. In The Levanter the hero, or anti-hero if you prefer, is a British businessman who, having lived in Syria for years, has almost “gone native” and become a man of uncertain identity. He is a bit of this and a bit of that, and a bit of everything else, in a region that is a mosaic of minorities. He doesn’t believe in anything and is loyal to no one. He could be your friend in the morning but betray you in the evening. He has only two goals in life: to survive and to make money… Today, Bashar Al-Assad is playing the role of the son of the Levanter, offering his services to any would-be buyer through interviews with whoever passes through the corner of Damascus where he is hiding. At first glance, the Levanter may appear attractive to those engaged in sordid games. In the end, however, the Levanter must betray his existing paymaster in order to begin serving a new one. Four years ago, Bashar switched to the Tehran-Moscow axis and is now trying to switch back to the Tel-Aviv-Washington one that he and his father served for decades. However, if the story has one lesson to teach, it is that the Levanter is always the source of the problem, rather than part of the solution. ISIS is there because almost half a century of repression by the Assads produced the conditions for its emergence. What is needed is a policy based on the truth of the situation in which both Assad and ISIS are parts of the same problem.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Like Father, Like Son http://www.aawsat.net/2015/02/article55341622/opinion-like-father-like-son, Ashraq Al-Awsat (February 20, 2015).

A.E. Housman photo
Simone Weil photo
Dave Matthews photo
Siegfried Sassoon photo

“Deep in my morning time he made his mark
And still he comes uncalled to be my guide
In devastated regions
When the brain has lost its bearings in the dark
And broken in it’s body’s pride
In the long campaign to which it had sworn allegiance.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) English poet, diarist and memoirist

Source: Collected Poems (1949), Revisitation, Lines from a draft version of "Revisitation" omitted from final version.

Zia Haider Rahman photo
Aldo Palazzeschi photo
Kage Baker photo
Joel Barlow photo
John Muir photo

“What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?”

Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. II (p. 49)

Felix Adler photo

“As the light of morning strikes now one peak and then another, some being illuminated while others are in the shadow, so the light of the essential moral principle shines now upon one duty and then upon another, while others are in the shadow.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 4 : Moral Ideals
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

Mikhail Bulgakov photo
Charles Brockden Brown photo
Samuel R. Delany photo

“As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it.”

Section 13 (closing words)
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Langston Hughes photo

“Dream within a dream,
Our dream deferred.
Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard?”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

"Island"
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
Variant: What happens
to a dream deferred?
Daddy, ain’t you heard?

John Updike photo
William G. Boykin photo
Maureen O'Hara photo
Edward Thomson photo
Lionel Richie photo

“We were running with the night;
Playing in the shadows.
Just you and I,
Till the morning light.”

Lionel Richie (1949) American singer-songwriter, musician, record producer and actor

Running with the Night, co-written with Cynthia Weil.
Song lyrics, Can't Slow Down (1983)

E. F. Benson photo