“...And we left the light for the night of the street”
“Now the evening s at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there s a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny s and Lindy s - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that s home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: New York, New York, it s a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery s down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it s a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson s face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There s a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It s an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it s ever going to get. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys nerves get tauter and women s fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the Late Show title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There s a life that s happening here. ( New York Blues )”
“You know what the best part of the stars is? What s that? They re the same no matter what sky you re standing under. I mean...yeah, they might move or look like they re in a different place, but they re the same stars. Yeah? So? So even if you re apart from someone you want to be with, you can look up at the stars and know they re looking at the same ones.”
“It s six o clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark - three-quarters down not three-quarters up - and the night begins. ( New York Blues )”
“The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night silence. Issac felt strangely wakeful. He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he began to grow sleepy; for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moan of the wind in the wood. ( The Dream Woman )”
“Three o clock in the morning. The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere behind a rise of ground. Two other, fiercer, whiter moons, set close together, suddenly top the rise, shoot a fan of blinding platinum far down ahead of them. Headlights. The humming burgeons into a roar. The touring car is going so fast it sways from side to side. The road is straight. The way is long. The night is short. (Jane Brown s Body )”
“Like a forest rose the huge peaks above the slumbering village, measuring the night and heavens. They beckoned him. And something born of the snowy desolation, born of the midnight and silent grandeur, born of the great listening hollows of the night, something that lay twixt terror and wonder, dropped from the vast wintry spaces down into his heart-- and called him. Very softly, unrecorded in any word or thought his brain could compass, it laid its spell upon him. Fingers of snow brushed the surface of his heart. The power and quiet majesty of the winter s night appalled him.... -The Glamour of the Snow”
“Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. thats all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread.”
“It s an easy guess, why some get famous over night and not during the day.”
“I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It s dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep in the room next door.”
“40Wednesday has been canceled due to a scheduling error.”
“What a fucking gorgeous night!”
“O, lente, lente currite noctis equi!”
“Na, mein Führer, wie war die Nacht?”
“An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!”
“Nė trupinio nepakando nuo savo Kūčių stalo, atsigulė į lovą ir sausomis akimis vos ne iki pat ryto pražiūrėjo į palubės tamsą. Dienos šviesa negali tiek parodyti žmogui, kiek nakties tamsybė. Viską parodo, visą gyvenimą parodo. Nežiūrėtum, nematytum, bet kad negali. Tavo gyvenimas lenda tau į akis – ir nenusuksi jų į šoną, nenukreipsi kitur vyzdžių.”
“Some nights are just too long when you don t know what keeps you awake...”