NIGHT QUOTES III
quotations about night
In visions of the night, like dropping rain,
Descend the many memories of pain.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on the sea. I felt inexplicably lightened; it was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
Above the care of Nature and of State,
Suspended in the noon of Night we wait,
All slumber nursing, to make sweet and pure,
While secret Nature, weaving works the cure.
We are the handmaids of the hollow night,
The angels of the dark, restoring sight;
We go -- the pains of Day to soothe, console --
Awake, arise! Behold thou art made whole.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"An Invocation", Cloudrifts at Twilight
Night held its fear smells and its things which came with slithering sounds.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
O bountiful Night, housekeeper of heaven's embroidery.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers - whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night-birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood-rat, it may be the footfall of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? - what the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live!
AMBROSE BIERCE
"A Tough Tussle"
Oh each successive night that comes has something in it of an abandoned ember that is slowly burning out, and it falls swathed in ruins, surrounded by funereal objects.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Night of the Soldier"
The night is in no way the work of reason, nor it is deduced from experience. It is experience itself.
KOBO ABE
The Frontier Within
Old Night ... can overpower all gods and mortal men.
HOMER
The Iliad
I heard the trailing garments of the Night
Sweep through her marble halls!
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
From the celestial walls!
I felt her presence, by its spell of might,
Stoop o'er me from above;
The calm, majestic presence of the Night,
As of the one I love.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"Hymn to the Night"
The barbarians come out at night.
J. M. COETZEE
Waiting for the Barbarians
In calm, fine nights of the latter summer, when the woods are clothed with the luxuriance of maturity, and the corn stands fully ripe--in the clear midnight, when all else is still--there comes a manifestation as of the conscious earth communing with the conscious universe. There rises a low, deep murmur of the sea upon its shores, and the leaves shiver with a sudden ecstasy, and a light of answering gladness ripples along the firmament, and sparkles to the edge of the remotest constellations. It is as if nature herself knew the counsel that embosoms all things, and for a moment confessed the glorious purpose.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Swiftly walk over the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear, --
Swift be thy flight!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"To Night"
Night-time is but a name for the darkness man nurtures within him.
GEORGE HOUGHTON
"Immortality"
Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon--
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of the beloved Night--
Come soon, soon!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
To Night
The night is feminine, just as the day is masculine, and like everything feminine, it holds both repose and terror.
WOLFGANG SCHIVELBUSCH
Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century
Here it is night: I stay at the Summit Temple.
Here I can touch the stars with my hand.
I dare not speak aloud in the silence
For fear of disturbing the dwellers of Heaven.
LI BAI
"The Summit Temple"
Through the empty window
the small boy watched the night on the hills,
the cool, dark hills, astonished to find them
massing together: a blurred and transparent stillness.
Through leaves that fluttered in darkness rose hills
where the things of the day--the slopes, the trees,
the vineyards--stood clearly defined and dead,
and life was another thing, made of wind, of sky,
of leaves, and of nothing.
CESARE PAVESE
"The Night"
Night is the other of the day which is subsumed by the larger problematic of illumination and productivity.
JOSEPH LIBERTSON
Proximity Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication
This night give me no rest even when I am asleep. It is profound but without depth, utterly superficial yet fathomless, extraordinary because so ordinary. Through a synesthesia I do not understand, I hear the night beyond night as an endless murmur, something like white noise that is indistinguishable from silence. The patterns, rhythms, and routines of daily life seem fashioned to silence this murmur, but every strategy fails. The silence of this night can never be completely silenced and its echo lends every word an uncanny resonance. If someone asked me what is so disturbing about the night beyond night, I would reply, "Nothing, absolutely nothing."
MARK C. TAYLOR
Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living