Quotes about Night

Foreign stars in the nights down there. A whole new astronomy Mensa, Musca, the Chameleon. Austral constellations nigh unknown to northern folk. Wrinkling, fading, through the cold black waters. As he rocks in his rusty pannier to the sea's floor in a drifting stain of guano. What family has no mariner in its tree? No fool, no felon. No fisherman.

I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life. Is that right? Aye. The kid turned the leather in his lap. The expriest watched him. At night, said Tobin, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears them grazing? Dont nobody hear them if they're asleep. Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes? Every man. Aye, said the expriest. Every man.

Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.

In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be.

They came to know the night skys well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients.

The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there's nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are?

They camped that night on the foreplain at the foot of a talus slope and the murder that had been reckoned upon took place.

The moon was already a quarter ways up. All but day bright. He felt like something in a jar.

What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.

But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful indeed, when annihilation pressed in on him on every side. Then it was ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to exist.

There was no Time, only Space. Who could say his mother had lived and did not live? She had been in one place, and was in another, that was all. And his soul could not leave her, wherever she was. Now she was gone abroad into the night, and he was with her still. They were together.

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night.