darkness Quotes

“I would not, could not, in the rain. Not in the dark. Not on a train. Not in a car. Not in a tree. I do not like them, Sam, you see.”

“Say! In the dark? Here in the dark! Would you, could you, in the dark?” “I would not, could not, in the dark.”

In the cold and the darkness, a poor little girl, with bare head and naked feet, roamed through the streets.

Wait a few minutes, our lantern will be lit, and, if you like light places, you will be satisfied.

“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

“We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”

“It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before.”

“Honestly, for an evil god of darkness, he certainly can be dull.”

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay To mould me Man, did I sollicite thee From darkness to promote me.”

“What in me is dark illumine.”

“This horror will grow milde, this darkness light.”

“Now it was coming to an end, and it was like he was watching the last flicker of light wink out in the darkness of an endless tunnel.”

“Who’s to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who’s to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say?”

“Let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“Steams like black clouds, and the groves of trees growing out over their lake are all covered with frozen spray, and wind down snakelike roots that reach as far as the water and help keep it dark. At night that lake burns like a torch. No one knows its bottom, no wisdom reaches such depths.”

“Even when the dark comes crashing through, when you need someone to carry you, when you’re broken on the ground, you will be found.”

“I could not, would not, on a boat. I will not, will not, with a goat. I will not eat them in the rain. I will not eat them on a train. Not in the dark! Not in a tree! Not in a car! You let me be! I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I will not eat them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them ANYWHERE!”

“Perhaps without the lows, the highs could not be reached. Were the souls the exception to that rule? Could they have the light without the darkness of the world?”

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”

“We aren’t bodies at all; who we are is the love inside us, and it is that love alone that determines our value. When our minds are filled with light, there is no room for darkness.”

“She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope.”

“The shepherds opened the door and told them to look in. They looked in and it was very dark and smoky. From within the darkness they also thought they heard the rumbling sound of fire accompanied by tormented cries. And the smell of brimstone wafted from the door. Christian turned to the shepherds and asked, ‘What does this mean?’ The shepherds told them, ‘This is a byway to hell, where hypocrites enter in.‘”

“The dead air shapes the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth.”

“And then the room went very dark and somehow, despite the chaos that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel’s hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.”

“It is a great privilege, and if you will, you also may learn the lesson of the furnace and of the great darkness just as surely as did those before you. Those who come down to the furnace go on their way afterwards as royal men and women, princes and princesses of the Royal Line.”

Where the Jedi courted power, the Sith lusted after it; where the Jedi believed they knew the truth, the Sith possessed it. Owned by the dark side, they ultimately became their knowledge.

“He looked up at the skies, and although they were still very dark he thought the day had probably had enough rain”

“God said, ‘Let there be light.’ I like to imagine that light replied, saying, ‘God, I have to wait for my twin brother, darkness, to be with me. I can’t be there without the darkness.’ God asked, ‘Why do you need to wait? Darkness is there.’ Light answered, ‘In that case, then I am also already there.”

“We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.”

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

“He’d had a nightmare. Well, not a nightmare. The nightmare. The one he’d been having a lot lately. The one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming. The one with the hands slipping from his grasp, no matter how hard he tried to hold on.”

“The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all-and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.”

“If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”

“When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off.”

“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”

“Please boss, don’t put that thing over my face, don’t put me in the dark. I’s afraid of the dark.”

“Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few.”

“She wears strength and darkness equally well, the girl has always been half goddess, half hell.”

“I close my eyes and let the darkness grow and spread until it morphs from a feeling of sadness into something worse: a memory, a flashback.”

“Love..It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep.

“Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. ‘Was I minus numbers?‘”

“Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.”

“Suddenly the King leaned hard on his friend’s neck and bowed his head. ‘Jewel,’ he said, ‘what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.’ ‘Yes,’ said Jewel. ‘We have lived too long. The worst thing in the world has come upon us.’ They stood like that for a minute or two and then went on.”

“Only when we’re brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

“The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.”

“I feel like a man who’s been trying to climb up out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside.”

“As a youngster I was frightened of the dark—used to wake up sobbing in it, as if it were water and I were drowning—but you will observe that I have disciplined myself so thoroughly against that fear, that I much prefer a dark to a lit room”

“Sailing lower into the pale green sea, he sought everywhere for the reddish glint of her scales, until the water became dense and dark green and then everything gradually got so black he lost all sight of where he was.”

“I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.”

“There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, an exquisite mystical experience.”

“Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players,* to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

“I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this- places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all.”

“All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.”

“The trouble with trying to find a brown-covered book among brown leaves and brown water at the bottom of a ditch of brown earth in the brown, well, grayish light of dawn, was that you couldn’t.”

“I ... feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water.”

“The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God.”

“I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake.”

“Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it.”

“Gradually I got used to the silence and darkness that surrounded me and forgot that it had ever been different, until she came—my teacher—who was to set my spirit free.”

“Her abode is concealed in the lowest recesses of a cave, wanting sun, and not pervious to any wind, dismal and filled with benumbing cold; and which is ever without fire, and ever abounding with darkness.”

“You can’t always see God’s plan.”

“There is false Knowledge: that which blindly clings To one as if ‘twere all, seeking no Cause, Deprived of light, narrow, and dull, and ‘dark.‘”

“Ignorance, begot Of Darkness, blinding mortal men, binds down Their souls to stupor, sloth, and drowsiness.”

“The death of my childhood naivety had come to pass. I trusted no one and I feared nothing, not even death itself, for everything I loved in this world had already been taken away from me. Ripped from my heart like a bandage. There was nothing left inside but darkness... darkness breeding darkness, and I was at one with it now.”

“I know that my life will only ever be a battle against the darkness - a darkness that is infinite and eternal in its very nature - and it will remain that way until the inevitable day when the darkness takes my last breath.”

“Darkness devours every shining day. Darkness demands and always has its way. Darkness listens, watches, waits. Darkness claims the day and celebrates. Sometimes in silence darkness comes. Sometimes with a gleeful banging of drums.”

“To know the darkness is to love the light, to welcome dawn and fear the coming night.”

“Holy men tell us life is a mystery. They embrace that concept happily. But some mysteries bite and bark and come to get you in the dark.”

″‘The city of Ember was made for us long ago by the Builders,’ the book said. ‘It is the only light in the dark world. Beyond Ember, the darkness goes on forever in all directions.‘”

“When the lights were off, as they were between nine at night and six in the morning, the city was so dark that people might as well have been wearing blindfolds.”

“You told the truth to the mayor on Assignment Day. I didn’t want to believe it, but then came the long blackout, and I knew-I knew things were as bad as you said.”

“I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was always a dark, sinister shape lurking just underneath the surface.”

“You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up.”

“God, do not lose your equilibrium. Even he who loves you and discerns your face in darkness, when he trembles like a light you breathe upon, — he cannot own you quite.”

“Their feelings about blackness were tied to feelings...about putrefaction and death.”

″‘I don’t stay after I set out dinner,’ Mrs. Dudley went on. ‘Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes.‘”

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

“Achilles’ eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know is in dark or disguise, told myself. I would know it even in madness.”

“Here ends the SILMARILLION. If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.”

“Dark phrases of womanhood of never havin been a girl half-notes scattered without rhythm/no tune distraught laughter fallin over a black girl’s shoulder it’s funny/it’s hysterical the melody-lesslness of her dance don’t tell nobody don’t tell a soul she’s a dancin on beer cans and shingles this must be the spook house another song with no singers lyrics/ no voices and interrupted solos unseen performances are we ghouls? children of horror? the joke?...”

“You forget that, in the dark, we must move closer together in order to see each other. You were never alone.”

“I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten. I stood on the sidewalk a nothing, a gathering of dust.”

“No, we should go forward, groping our way through the darkness, stumbling perhaps at times, and try to do what good lay in our power.”

“Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness.”

“Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother’s milk. Darkness will make you strong.”

“[Pride and power] are the same except that pride leaves the lights on and power can do it in the dark.”

“At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel that the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.”

“Look deeper through the telescope and do not be afraid when the stars collide towards the darkness, because sometimes the most beautiful things begin in chaos.”

“Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”

“He can be the husband and father Hoyt’s dirty work has never permitted him to be. He can be a whole new man. He can be free.”

“Once she told me I looked like the sun to her, because of my hair. I asked her if I shined like the sun, and she told me, ‘No, Daddy, you shine more like the moon, when it’s dark outside.”

“YOUR FATE IS NOT YET SEALED. EVEN IN THE DARKEST NIGHT, A STAR WILL SHINE, A BELL WILL CHIME, A PATH WILL BE REVEALED.”

“I am anti-life, the Beast of Judgment. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds…of everything. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?”

“There’s no way you’re going to make it out of this world without spending some time down in the valley or in a dark place. But this isn’t the time to give up. This is the time to understand that God is trying to lead you to your purpose and to your gift.”

“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist.”

“I did not depend upon the great vision as I should have done; I depended upon the two sticks that I had seen in the lesser vision. It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those shadows men get lost.”

“Where does ‘darkness’ leave off, and ‘light’ begin?”

“The evil genius of darkness presided at its birth, it came forth under the veil of mystery, its true features being carefully concealed, and every deceptive art has been and is practicing to have this spurious brat received as the genuine offspring of heaven-born liberty.”

“When things are darkest, God shines his light the brightest.”

“I wish I could show you, When you are lonely or in darkness, The Astonishing Light Of your own being!”

“I didn’t want to be in hell, even for a moment. I sure as hell wasn’t going there just to spit in the face of the Prince of Darkness, whoever he might be!”

“At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. [...] As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like a the shock of a cannon - then all is darkness and silence!”

“They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure.”

“Because you, mouse, can tell Gregory a story. Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.”

″‘Once upon a time,’ he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.”

“She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold, while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness. My parents would have wrung their hands and tried to make it up to me, as parents will with a handicapped or especially ugly child. Even Call, his nose too large for his small face, had a certain satisfactory ugliness.”

“Magpie draws her body into the shadow of the rocks, until she feels herself melting into blackness.”

″ ‘I’m scared,’ said Little Bear. ‘Why are you scared, Little Bear?’ asked Big Bear. ‘I don’t like the dark,’ said Little Bear. ‘What dark?’ said Big Bear. ‘The dark all around us,’ said Little Bear.”

″ ‘Where are we going?’ asked Little Bear. ‘Out!’ said Big Bear. ‘Out into the darkness?’ said Little Bear. ‘Yes!’ said Big Bear. ‘But I’m scared of the dark!’ said Little Bear.”

“Then they ran and they ran through the dark woods back to their homes as fast as they could...all the way back to their snuggly beds, where they huddled and cuddled their own little teds.”

“Then out of the darkness, clearer and clearer, the sound of sobbing came nearer and nearer.”

“I suddenly made myself leave the darkness and go for it […] It was a dance of courage. I felt then, and still feel now, that I was transformed by those four steps.”

“Buttocks glued together, heels solidly planted, Poil of Carotte stands trembling in the darkness. The blackness is so dense that he thinks he’s blind. From time to time a gust of wind enfolds him like an icy sheet and threatens to carry him away.”

“With that, Miyax became Julie. She was given a cot near the door in Martha’s little house and was soon walking to school in the darkness. She liked to learn the printed English words in books, and so a month passed rather happily.”

“All the coldness and darkness and infinite loneliness of the world filled David’s mind until it seemed ready to burst.”

“It was dark in the wood and they had to be brave, for things moved all around them.”

“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens...”

“At once, Shang lit the light and the wolf blew it out again, but Shang had seen the wolf’s hairy face.”

“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

“I only know that learning to believe in the power of my own words has been the most freeing experience of my life. It has brought me the most light. And isn’t that what a poem is? A lantern glowing in the dark.”

“As she listened to his wailing, Mowzer felt a sudden strange sadness for him. How lonely he must be, she thought, endlessly hunting the men-mice in the deeps of darkness, and never returning to the rosy glow of a red-hot range. And her kind heart was moved to comfort him.”

“They removed their raincoats to reveal robes of all colors, all textures. It was a rainbow that summoned forth anything but thoughts of death. This, Citra realized, was intentional. Scythes wished to be seen as the many facets of light, not of darkness.”

“In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God.”

“Allah saved him from the grief of the ark, so he pierced natural darkness by what Allah gave him of divine knowledge, while he did not depart from nature. He tested him with many trials (9) and gave him experience in many places so that he might realize patience in himself in the trials Allah gave him.”

“Now it the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.”

“Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.”

“Of all the seasons of the year, the rabbit most preferred winter, for the sun set early then and the dining-room windows became dark and Edward could see his own reflection in the glass. And what a reflection it was!”

“As soon as sin was their choice, the cover of darkness was their preference.”

“It’s dark where I am and I cannot find the light. There are shadows all around me and my heart is full of fright.”

“Something darkened in me because I saw that dad was shattered. I didn’t want a shattered father. I want him whole, present, affectionate, loving. I still want that.”

“Standing alone in that damp, dark garage, I knew, for the first time, that I could survive.”

“What can I say ? I’m a rose in the snow—the bright spot in your dark, seems-like-it’s-always-depressed life.”

“My body goes before me like a lantern down a dark lane, bringing one thing after another out of darkness into a ring of light. I dazzle you.”

“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”

“And he wanted to rise up, singing, singing in that great morning, the morning of his new life. Ah, how his tears ran down, how they blessed his soul! --as he felt himself, out of the darkness, and the fire, and the terrors of death, rising upward to meet the saints.”

“It was only dark for a second. Maybe not even that, but it’s enough to make everyone stop eating. Everyone is frozen. What’s that expression? Waiting for the other shoe to drop? But it doesn’t. The lights are on, they stay on. But it doesn’t change the fact that they blinked.”

“There, her beginning, and she fought through darkness still; toward that moment when she would make her peace with God, when she would hear Him speak, and He would wipe all tears from her eyes; as, in that other darkness, after eternity, she had heard John cry.”

“The darkness of his sin was in the hardheartedness with which he resisted God’s power.”

“Yes, he had heard it all his life, but it was only now that his ears were opened to this sound that came from darkness, that could only come from darkness, that yet bore such sure witness to the glory of the light.”

“Little Toot felt very lonely. He wasn’t wanted anywhere or by anyone. With his spirits drooping he let the tide carry him where it willed. He did not see the sky grow dark. He did not feel the wind blowing harder and harder. The wind was whipping into a real storm.”

“Anyway, one night the Hairyman -that’s what us mob call those spirits- he grabbed my big sister by the throat. We were al chasing through the house. My big sister, Sue, thought she was gonna scared the rest of us, so she hid in the darkest room and kept real quiet. None of us could find her.”

“I know those old people sent her to protect my spirit. They do that sort of thing. She came to me just when I needed her. She stays with me all through the dark nights. I don’t have to worry about squishing her in bed ‘cause she knows which way I’m gonna roll even before I do.”

“He was falling upwards. The earth was snatched away beneath him, and he was screaming. Screaming and falling into the endless black of the night sky. Around him, the stars began to spin, then run together. Then they too disappeared and there was nothing but the darkness.”

“Aelin had promised herself, months and months ago, that she would not pretend to be anything but what she was. She had crawled through darkness and blood and despair-she had survived.”

“That’s when he came swimming real slow out of the deep, and even though my head was underneath the dark water I could see him coming right at me. . . Where he should have had a face there was nothing but dark gray. Where he should have had eyes there was nothing but a darker colder-looking color. He grabbed my leg and started pulling me down.”

“I’ll never forget that first hour of knowing I was blind. I was so frightened that it was hard for me to breathe. It was as if I’d been put inside something that was all dark and I couldn’t get out.”

“The dark night into which the world was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening.”

“Now, as we have no passports, we shall have to cross the frontier by night, when no one can see us. We shall leave at dusk and should be there by dawn.”

“Oh, they were so tired of their lives. To die like this was better than to live as they had been doing, going nowhere but where Owl led them, always in darkness, scraping their feet raw for a few grains.”

“The sky grew darker and darker blue, and soon the stars came out. Teddy Robinson lay and stared at them without blinking, and they twinkled and shone and winked at him as if they were surprised to see a teddy bear lying in the garden.”

“It was dark when I heard it. I’d been asleep: God knows how. I guess it was my mind’s way of denying reality. Anyway, I woke up suddenly and there was this awful noise; a sort of moaning, and a shuffling sound outside the bunker. I lay rigid, biting my lip, something was moving about out there, something big.”

“The stillness had become an expectant one; the house seemed to hold is breath; the darkness pressed up to him, pressing him with a question: Come on, Tom, the clock has struck thirteen- what are you going to do about it?”

Man-Man and Nenna patrol the coconut plantation in dead of night, as rat-bats fly and criss-cross in the darkness.

“It was dark when I heard it. I’d been asleep. God knows how. I guess it was my mind’s way of denying reality. Anyway, I woke up suddenly and there was this awful noise; a sort of moaning, and a shuffling sound outside the bunker.”

“All these scents and sounds are part of the story I have to tell, with light and darkness, shadows and tragedy interwoven.”

“Darkness was already closing in. There was a kind of glare in the evil heaven.”

“This was a welcome suggestion, for, as all travellers know, if you don’t sit by a camp fire in the evening, you have to sit by nothing in the dark...”

“The previous evening, I recalled, I had observed _despite the darkness_ that my bungalow was surrounded on three side by dense thorny scrub. Our in front a huge clearing stretched away into the night.”

″‘What is this?’ said the Leopard, ‘that is so ‘sclusively dark, and yet so full of little pieces of light.‘”

“Your heart will conquer darkness. Trust in that.”

″‘There are different kinds of darkness,’ Rhys said. I kept my eyes shut. ‘There is the darkness that frightens, the darkness that soothes, the darkness that is restful.’ I pictured each. ‘There is the darkness of lovers, and the darkness of assassins. It becomes what the bearer wishes it to be, needs it to be. It is not wholly bad or good.‘”

“Find the light that makes your lantern shine,” she used to say. “hold on to it, even when the dark surrounds you. Not even the strongest wind will blow out the flame.”

“It wasn’t a roar Zafira heard. Something else beckoned from the darkness, enticing her. Growing with her every visit. It was as if a thread of her heart had snagged in the forest and was trying to reel her back in.”

“Find the light that makes your lantern shine,” she used to say. “hold on to it, even when the dark surrounds you. Not even the strongest wind will blow out the flame.”

“Such glimpses of oppressive dark naturally led his thinking to Gosling-- Gosling Cornivinous Arbour of the Cornivinius Arbours-- a powerful family with ties to some of the most ancient bloodlines of Boschenberg and Brandenbrass.”

He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.

“My dear, I’m going to have a pretty lonely walk between this and Kingdom Come. Won’t you give me one kiss? It’ll be something to keep off the darkness now and then.”

“There are darknesses in life, and there are lights; you are one of the lights. You will have happy life and good life, and your husband will be blessed in you.”

It set every nerve of him a- tremble, it aroused all the demon in his soul.

How can it be otherwise? Why should a wretched man, guilty, we will say, of murder, prefer to keep the dead corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at once, and let the universe take care of it!”

“That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin.”

It was only the darkened house that could contain her.

“He knew, by some spiritual sense,—for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this,—he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his heart-strings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it.”

And, mother, the old dame said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man’s mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight, here in the dark wood.

As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain had brought me in, before he left me, the good old constitutional rushlight of those virtuous days—an object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing could ever be lighted at, and which was placed in solitary confinement at the bottom of a high tin tower, perforated with round holes that made a staringly wide-awake pattern on the walls. When I had got into bed, and lay there footsore, weary, and wretched, I found that I could no more close my own eyes than I could close the eyes of this foolish Argus. And thus, in the gloom and death of the night, we stared at one another.

The gentlemen who rented the room would sometimes take their evening meal at home in the living room that was used by everyone, and so the door to this room was often kept closed in the evening. But Gregor found it easy to give up having the door open, he had, after all, often failed to make use of it when it was open and, without the family having noticed it, lain in his room in its darkest corner.

He saw nothing but death or the advance towards death in everything. But his cherished scheme only engrossed him the more. Life had to be got through somehow till death did come. Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.