“I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is an abomination.”
“A lonely night is more profound then lonesome nights.”
“Yet just as the day has two halves, one governed by the sun and the other by the moon, so there are many who are people of the day and who busy themselves with daytime deeds, whilst others are children of the night, their minds consumed with nocturnal notions; but yet there are some in whom the two merge like the rising of the sun and the moon in a day.”
“Night is mine, together with a substantial part of the future.”
“it ll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night”
“A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth. He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them. But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. ( Hunger )”
“The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet - her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws - and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand. ( The Pool )”
“We did not receive any industry recognized training in extreme night shift work and correct sleep recovery when working nights atop the 13,797’ Mauna Kea mountain. My personal observations showed that sufficient daytime sleep recovery could not be achieved during the extremely long winter night shifts.”
“An Evening Air I go out in the grey evening In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation. I go out into the hard loneliness of the barren field of grey evening In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation. In the gathering darkness a long, swift train suddenly Passes me like a lighting. Hard and ponderous and loud are the wheels. As ponderous as the darkness, and as beautiful. I look on, enchanted, and listen to the sounds of lamentation In the soft fragrant air. The long rails, grey-dark, smooth as a serpent, shiver, and A soft, low thing cries out in the distance, But the sounds are hard and heavy, In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.”
“White-crested waves crash on the shore. The masts sway violently, every which way. In the gray sky the gulls are circling like white flakes. Rain squalls blow past like gray slanting sails, and blue gaps open in the sky. The air brightens. A cold silvery evening. The moon is overhead, and down below, in the water; and all around it-a wide frame of old, hammered, scaly silver. Etched on the silver-silent black fishing boats, tiny black needles of masts, little black men casting invisible lines into the silver. And the only sounds are the occasional plashing of an oar, the creaking of an oarlock, the springlike leap and flip-flop of a fish. ( The North )”
“You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.”
“You’re never alone When there is a whole sky to hug you tight. You’re never alone When there are hundreds of stars looking upon you each time you try tirelessly to sleep at night . You’re never alone my dear as long as you have a breath to take and a will to fight ….”
“He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn t notice: he liked--oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!--the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him.”
“She spared a glance for the townscape of jagged roofs and straggly tree branches, of rough edges that snagged the sky and made it bleed starlight.”
“My next memory is of waking up, it then being dark outside, and my brother and sister fast asleep on the couch. Sitting up I sensed something was broken. Maybe the night? It was open and alive with lights and noises and worried voices. The adults were up, and in and out: we were all waiting for something.”
“The night folded around them with a sweetness and poignancy heightened by the new pale stars that prickled silver fire in the water of the lily ponds, by the scented winds, and by the nearness of each other.”
“I ran from them. Nights, yellow lights scoured sand. What was ever found but women in skirts folded around the men they loved that Friday? No one found me. And how could that have been, here, where even botanical names were recorded and small roads mapped in red? Night, the sky is black paper pecked with pinholes.”