Dark Quotes - Page 22

• To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.

  W. S. Gilbert

  Block, Long, Silence

  The Mikado act 1 (1885)

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• My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

  Diane Setterfield

  Running, Wall, Lying

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

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• Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Fall, Night, Order

  Margaret J. Wheatley (2006). “Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World”, p.176, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.

  Carolyn Parkhurst

  Dream, Heart, Sleep

  Carolyn Parkhurst (2003). “The Dogs of Babel”, Large Print Press

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• Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can't hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that's all.

  Jack Kerouac

  Happiness, Running, Beach

  Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.7, Penguin

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• I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.

  Louis L'Amour

  Book, Light, Hoarding

  Louis L'Amour (2008). “Education of a Wandering Man”, p.82, Bantam

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• What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

  Diane Setterfield

  Wind, Midnight, Roaring

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

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• It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

  Charles M. Schulz

  Kings, Growing Up, Boys

  Charles M. Schulz (1971). “Snoopy and "It was a dark and stormy night"”, Henry Holt & Co

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• I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.

  Douglas Coupland

  Crazy, Pigs, Sky

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• He looked at her an instant, for the effect of the graceful girlish figure with pale, passionate face and dark eyes full of sorrow, pride and resolution was wonderfully enhanced by the gloom of the great room, and glimpses of a gathering storm in the red autumn sky.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Eye, Autumn, Pride

  Louisa May Alcott (1997). “A Long Fatal Love Chase”, Thorndike Pr

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• At that moment, it seemed to him that time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke — the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well.

  Paulo Coelho

  Eye, Heart, Two

  "The Alchemist". Book by Paulo Coelho, 1988.

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• Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge -- dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be.

  Mark Helprin

  Dream, Memories, Children

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• A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

  Henry James

  Horse, Night, Ideas

  Henry James (2015). “The Complete Novels of Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady + The Wings of the Dove + What Maisie Knew + The American + The Bostonian + The Ambassadors + Washington Square and more (Unabridged): Confidence + Roderick Hudson + The Awkward Age + The Europeans + The Golden Bowl + The Other House + The Outcry + The Princess Casamassima + The Reverberator + The Sacred Fount….”, p.2534, e-artnow

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• I will see you bereft of all that you have, of home and happiness and beautiful things. I will see your nation cast down and your allies drawn away. I will see you as alone and friendless and wretched as am I; and then you may live as long as you like, in some dark and lonely corner of the earth, and I shall call myself content. -Lien, Albino Celestial (Dragon)

  Naomi Novik

  Beautiful, Lonely, Home

  Naomi Novik (2009). “In His Majesty's Service: Three Novels of Temeraire (His Majesty's Service, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War)”, p.674, Del Rey

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• In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Dream, Men, Water

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• Girl lithe and tawny, the sun that forms the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds filled your body with joy, and your luminous eyes and your mouth that has the smile of the water. A black yearning sun is braided into the strands of your black mane, when you stretch your arms. You play with the sun as with a little brook and it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.

  Pablo Neruda

  Girl, Eye, Play

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• He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have *swum* on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses? With his Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would he have had the imagination?

  Arundhati Roy

  Land, Shoes, Glasses

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• I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

  Pablo Neruda

  Sleep, Thinking, Roots

  Pablo Neruda, Donald D. Walsh (2004). “Residence on Earth”, p.119, New Directions Publishing

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• The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Flower, Flames, Rose

  Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.40, Vintage

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• Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Faith, Courage, Destiny

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.167, A&C Black

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• The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are.

  Anne Lamott

  Mean, Writing, Artist

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.234, Anchor

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• I believe there are techniques of the human mind whereby, in its dark deep, problems are examined, rejected or accepted. Such activities sometimes concern facets a man does not know he has. How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and a clearness is there, maybe the results of the black reasoning. And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it.

  John Steinbeck

  Morning, Pain, Believe

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.286, Penguin

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• Now they are empty, Ramon replied with a shrug of broad, muscled shoulders on his six-foot-three-inch frame....For the first time, a glint of humor touched Ramon Galverra's finely sculpted mouth and arrogant dark eyes.

  Judith McNaught

  Eye, Feet, Three

  Judith McNaught (2016). “Tender Triumph”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

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• We've barley stepped into the bright glow of the realms when everything goes dark.

  Libba Bray

  Barley, Realms

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• Mr. Fresh looked up. "The book says if we don't do our jobs everything could go dark, become like the Underworld. I don't know what the Underworld is like, Mr. Asher, but I've caught some of the road show from there a couple of times, and I'm not interested in finding out. How 'bout you?" "Maybe it's Oakland," Charlie said. "What's Oakland?" "The Underworld." "Oakland is not the Underworld!" "The Tenderloin?" Charlie suggested.

  Christopher Moore

  Jobs, Couple, Book

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