Darkness At Noon Quotes

What had he said to them? "I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people ... " And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either, But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one's goal before one's eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night. ~ Arthur Koestler

One always imagines that the days that change one's life must be marked with something extraordinary in nature - storms and lightning, darkness at noon, and so on. In truth they are indistinguishable from any other, which is one reason we feel mocked, as if the world is telling us we are inconsequential. ~ Margaret George

The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. ~ Arthur Koestler

The teaching of the buddhas is: Find time and a place to remain unoccupied. That's what meditation is all about. Find at least one hour every day to sit silently doing nothing, utterly unoccupied, just watching whatsoever passes by inside. In the beginning you will be very sad, looking at things inside you; you will feel only darkness and nothing else, and ugly things and all kinds of black holes appearing. You will feel agony, no ecstasy at all. But if you persist, persevere, the day comes when all these agonies disappear, and behind the agonies is the ecstasy. ~ Rajneesh

I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped, had not finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his studies is true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a great injustice. I'll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered upon this path only because, at that time, it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to light. Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch- that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I'll be at your side, till the darkness dies. ~ Laura Thalassa

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. But if to love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: to melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; and to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving; to rest at noon and meditate love's ecstasy; to return home at eventide with gratitude; and then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips. ~ Kahlil Gibran

This is the way we win over our enemies, not with bigger weapons, or faster ships, but with human courage, ingenuity, and sacrifice. Don't lose hope. We've faced the darkness before - it has nothing new to teach us. As we go about our lives, let us remember the example Dr. Navarro set for us. At the right time, anyone can be a hero. ~ Ann Aguirre

Night is a time of terror. Worries and anxieties are unleashed by the darkness, when the distractions and the busyness of the day can no longer keep them at bay. Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly ~ Bill O'Reilly

I am the Dharma Raja for a reason. I would not have my own impartiality questioned by favoring you. Surely, you knew this."
"What would you have done if I failed?"
"You couldn't fail," said Amar. "That's why I did not worry. You were meant to be the queen of these lands. We were meant to rule together. For all of eternity."
"I would rather die than rule by the side of a coward."
Shadows curled away from Amar's body.
"Coward?" he hissed. "Cowardice is running from the difficult choices made by the ones that love you most. If I have been a coward, so have you, jaani. But we may start anew. Let us not speak of this time any longer."
He tried, once more, to tilt my face into a kiss, but I moved away.
"I saw you spread the rumors yourself in the Otherworld. I watched you take solace in another's arms. And if surviving the agni pariksha means spending eternity with you, then I would rather live life as a mortal."
The room became damp and sticky with darkness.
"What lies you hurl at me," he murmured.
"I don't trust you."
He stepped back, wounded. "Has your judgment become so compromised? If you truly do not believe the truth in my words, then you have no place here."
We stared at one another, fury swelling between us. The silence expanded, solidifying our words like manacles.
"Once, I thought you loved me," I said in a broken voice. "I refuse to live in your shadow for the rest of eternity."
His eyes widened, obsi ~ Roshani Chokshi

May we feel after Thee; still calling out in the darkness, as children waking in the night call "Father," so may we call out for God; and, at times, even if we do not hear Thy voice, may there be the form of a hand resting upon us, and that shall be enough; for we shall take hold of it, though it be in the dark, and it shall guide us to the growing light; for the day shall come, and the release and triumph. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The sleepless hum of the city was abidingly in his ears, and the lamps that dotted the misty pavements stared at him blinkingly all along the route. The tall black buildings rose up grimly into the night; the faces that flitted to and fro along the pavements, kept ever sliding past him, melting into the darkness; and the cabs and 'buses, still astir in the streets, had a ghostly air as they vanished in the gloom.

("An Unexpected Journey") ~ J.H. Pearce

And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that's as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy for so long. At first I felt odd- as if I shouldn't be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It's my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive: happy, suddenly with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in. ~ Mark Doty

Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe, outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close. Once having entered the tumultuous orbit of a black hole, nothing can break away from its passionate but fatal embrace. Though cons of teasing play may be granted the doomed, ultimately play turns to prey and all are sucked haplessly―brilliantly aglow, true, but oh so briefly so―into the fire-breathing maw of oblivion. Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order. And darkness illumination: for, as dragons are also called worms, so black hole are known as wormholes, offering a mystical and intimate pathway to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, thus bring light as they consume it. ~ Robert Coover

Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The True-Blue American"

Jeremiah Dickson was a true-blue American,
For he was a little boy who understood America, for he felt that he must
Think about everything; because that's all there is to think about,
Knowing immediately the intimacy of truth and comedy,
Knowing intuitively how a sense of humor was a necessity
For one and for all who live in America. Thus, natively, and
Naturally when on an April Sunday in an ice cream parlor Jeremiah
Was requested to choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split
He answered unhesitatingly, having no need to think of it
Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began:
Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European;
Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between;
Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing
in his breast
The infinite and the gold
Of the endless frontier, the deathless West.

"Both: I will have them both!" declared this true-blue American
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an April Sunday, instructed
By the great department stores, by the Five-and-Ten,
Taught by Christmas, by the circus, by the vulgarity and grandeur of
Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon,
Tutored by the grandeur, vulgarity, and infinite appetite gratified and
Shining in the darkness, of the light
On Saturdays at th ~ Delmore Schwartz

Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness ... But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

I've been drunk while swimming in the river, at noon the temperature of water, air, and body all the same, so that I can't tell where body ends and water begins and it's a melding of the universe, with the river curling round our bodies, cool and warm rushes intermingling in lost patterns, filling all times and all depths. ~ Samuel Shem

I walked far down a dirt side road and into a farmer's field - some sort of cereal that was chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely - a mood of darkness and inevitability and facination - a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out. ~ Douglas Coupland

It is, once again, fatally easy to misunderstand, to draw the lines wrong, to see "our present system" as automatically good, so that anyone who disturbs it - as Jesus was disturbing the system of the scribes and Pharisees - must be "satanic," must be from the dark side. That road leads to the "war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness," as at Qumran: the overbright light of an overrealized eschatology, enabling "us" to see ourselves as "children of light," casting a surreal, overdramatized shadow over "them," the "children of darkness. ~ N. T. Wright

I told Tamsin that I didn't believe in happily ever after anymore. I believed my heart was broken beyond repair and that anyone this broken could not possibly be happy and, therefore, never have a happy ending. I believed Trik was gone, that he had chosen a life of darkness over me. Turns out I was wrong, not about the happy part, but about Trik. He had chosen me. He saved me, or what was left of me. But I have not chosen him. I can't. He is not what I crave and what I crave I cannot have. So I can't choose Trik, and all that is left for me to choose is existence or death. Flip the coin, tails stares back at me. Death it is. ~ Cassie Tate ~ Quinn Loftis

Faith, hope and charity go together. Hope is practised through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God's mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness. Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! It thus transforms our impatience and our doubts into the sure hope that God holds the world in his hands and that, as the dramatic imagery of the end of the Book of Revelation points out, in spite of all darkness he ultimately triumphs in glory. Faith, which sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross, gives rise to love. Love is the light - and in the end, the only light - that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working. Love is possible, and we are able to practise it because we are created in the image of God. To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world - this is the invitation I would like to extend with the present Encyclical. ~ Benedict XVI

Lily says nothing as she heads to bed. But then she looks at me and says, 'You sound just like Ma,' before switching off the lights and plunging us into darkness. I'm left frozen by her words. I was wrong. Because as it turns out, that's the ultimate diss in our family. ~ Wai Chim

True law necessarily is rooted in ethical assumptions or norms; and those ethical principles are derived, in the beginning at least, from religious convictions. When the religious understanding, from which a concept of law arose in a culture, has been discarded or denied, the laws may endure for some time, through what sociologists call "cultural lag"; but in the long run, the laws also will be discarded or denied.

With this hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest that the corpus of English and American laws--for the two arise for the most part from a common root of belief and experience--cannot endure forever unless it is animated by the spirit that moved it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people. Certain moral postulates of Christian teaching have been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we grope in judicial darkness. . . .

We suffer from a strong movement to exclude such religious beliefs from the operation of courts of law, and to discriminate against those unenlightened who cling fondly to the superstitions of the childhood of the race.

Many moral beliefs, however, though sustained by religious convictions, may not be readily susceptible of "scientific" demonstration. After all, our abhorrence of murder, rape, and other crimes may be traced back to the Decalogue and other religious injunctions. If it can be shown that our oppositio ~ Russell Kirk

Hmmm. Odd. Okay." He took Nick's hand.
Nick pulled back. "Dude, don't touch me."
"Why not?"
Why not? Really? He had to explain stranger-danger and personal space? Where did this guy live that he didn't understand grabbing another dude's body parts without an invitation was a first class ticket to a major butt-whipping event.
"Look, I don't know you, and we're not dating. So keep your hands off me."
Again with the annoyed noise. "Then how can I lead you if I can't touch you when you can't see?"
"How 'bout you don't lead me anywhere?" Nick was beginning to like the darkness. Unlike Asmodeus, it was quiet and rather peaceful. And it definitely didn't give him a headache.
"But you said you couldn't see."
Nick was aghast at the way this guy's mind worked. "That doesn't mean you can touch me."
"I'm so confused. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

She could see so much in those eyes: pain, vulnerability, and...something tender and soft as he looked at her. True, there was darkness, but it seemed more a result of what had been done to him than what he would do to others. The good in those eyes far outweighed the bad. ~ Kalcee Clornel

But don't forget who you really are. And I'm not talking about your so-called real name. All names are made up by someone else, even the one your parents gave you. You know who you really are. When you're alone at night, looking up at the stars, or maybe lying in your bed in total darkness, you know that nameless person inside you ... Your muscles will toughen. So will your heart and soul. That's necessary for survival. But don't lose touch with that person deep inside you, or else you won't really have survived at all. ~ Louis Sachar

I love you," she said, speaking clearly so that there might be no confusion. "I love you utterly and completely. I love your elegant hands and the way you smile with only one side of your mouth - when you smile at all - and I love how grave your eyes are. I love that you let me invade your house with nearly my entire family and yours, and never even turned a hair. I love that you made love to me when I asked you, purely for politeness' sake, and I love that you got mad at me later and made me make love to you. I love that you let Her Grace and her puppies construct a nest out of your shirts in your dressing room. I love that you've spent years selflessly saving people in St. Giles - although I want you to stop right now. I love that you killed a man for me, even if I'm still mad at you about it. I love that you saved my letters before we even knew each other well, and I love the curt, overly serious letters you wrote to me in return."

She looked at him very seriously.

"I love you, Godric St. John, and now I'm breaking my word. I will not leave you. You may either come with me to Laurelwood or I'll stay here with you in your musty old house in London and drive you mad with all my talking and relatives and… and exotic sexual positions until you break down and love me back, for I'm warning you that I'm not giving up until you love me and we're a happy family with dozens of children."

She paused at that point because she'd run out of breath ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

A Last Word
Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is over worn, the birds all flown;
And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity: vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band..
Let us go hence, some whither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labor, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust ~ Ernest Dowson

Lumpini Park at night: love at its cheapest, but the incidence of HIV is said to be over 60 per cent. In the darkness: furtive movement on benches and on the grass, muted moans and whispers, rustlings of large animals in heat, the intensity of the atomic fusion of sec and death (highly addictive, they say). ~ John Burdett

But, this dark place is not the end. Remember that the darkness of night precedes the dawn. And as long as your heart still beats, this is not the death of it. You don't have to die here. Sometimes, the ocean floor is only a stop on the journey. And it is when you are at this lowest point, that you are faced with a choice. You can stay there at the bottom, until you drown. Or you can gather pearls and rise back up - stronger from the swim, and richer from the jewels. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

If the day is done, if birds sing no more, if the wind has flagged tired, then draw the veil of darkness thick upon me, even as thou hast wrapt the earth with the coverlet of sleep and tenderly closed the petals of the drooping lotus at dusk. From the traveller, whose sack of provisions is empty before the voyage is ended, whose garment is torn and dustladen, whose strength is exhausted, remove shame and poverty, and renew his life like a flower under the cover of thy kindly night. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

If darkness is really not darkness at all, but rather, the absence of light, then my flaws are not really flaws at all, but rather, the absence of you. ~ Christopher Poindexter ~ Beth Hyland

When I woke again, I was in darkness.
Fighting my way to awareness, I realized I'd heard sharp voices. Yells echoed back and forth, calling commands to different ridings; from the distance there came the clang and clash of steel.
It's Bran, I thought, elated and fearful. He's attacking the camp!
As if in answer, I heard his voice. "Mel! Mel!"
I rolled to my knees, fighting against invisible knives of pain. One more cry of "Mel!" at slightly more of a distance enabled me to gather my courage and stand up.
Diving through the tent flap, I screamed with all my failing strength, "BRAN!" And I clutched at the tent to keep myself from falling full-length on the muddy ground. A light mist bathed my face, making me shiver--a distant part of me acknowledged that in addition to everything else I had a pretty hot fever going.
"Meliara! Mel! Mel!" A number of voices took up the cry, and I realized that all our people must have attacked.
Again I gathered all my strength and started forward. Which was a mistake. My left foot simply refused to carry my weight.
I started to fall, felt hard hands catching one of my arms. My leg jolted--and thank goodness, that finished me. ~ Sherwood Smith

I make my way to the cave and notice a silhouette at the lip of the cavern. Kiaran. "Let me guess," I say, drawing nearer, "your sister told you where to find me."

His smile isn't visible in the darkness, but I can hear it when he speaks. "On the contrary," he says. "She told me I looked like I needed fresh air. It wasn't until I saw you that I realized she decided to engage in her second-favorite hobby."

"Subterfuge?"

"I was going to say meddling, but you're not wrong. ~ Elizabeth May

It's easy to get carried away in the search for "experience." I think that people boast of "experience" as if all experience is good. The whole world will tell you that all mistakes are good and all experiences are worthwhile. Nevertheless, I believe in an equilibrium. I always say "throw yourself out there" but at the same time, I want to tell you, that there are so many experiences in life that you're better off not experiencing. Experience is not always a positive thing, it can affect a person in such a way that it is like finding a tulip trampled under foot, run over by bicycles and spit on. And then the tulip is set on a windowsill for sale with a sign that says "I have had so much experience, that's why I'm more expensive." But the truth is, there's nothing wrong with being that tulip in the field, untouched and caressed by moonlight. Yes, we have the choice to make mistakes, but we also have the choice to choose what things we allow in to make marks upon our lives. It is okay to be untouched by darkness. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Do you think there really is a Heaven?" Jamie asked, his small voice floating up into the darkness.
I lay still, afraid to answer, because I wasn't sure.
"Yes, Jamie," Mary said. "And tomorrow we'll see Mum and Dad."
"And Bella," I added. "She'll bark the second she sees you."
Jamie giggled. To laugh at our own death seemed strange, but it was all we could do. ~ Galaxy Craze

And there she was.

In deepening blues of descending night, amid the snow beginning till, Aelin Galathynius had appeared before the sealed southern gate.

Had appeared before Erawan and Maeve.

Her unbound hair billowed in the wind like a golden banner, a last ray of light with the dying of the day.

Silence fell. Even the screaming stopped as all turned toward the gate.

But Aelin did not balk. Did not run from the Valg queen and king who halted as if in delight at the lone figure who dared face them.

Lysandra let out a strangled sob. "She-she has no magic left." The shifter's voice broke. "She has nothing left."

Still Aelin lifted her sword.

Flames ran down the blade.

One flame against the darkness gathered.

One flame to light the night.

Aelin raised her shield, and flames encircled it, too.

Burning bright, burning undaunted. A vision of old, reborn once more.

The cry went down the castle battlements, through the city, along the walls.

The queen had come home at last.

The queen had come to hold the gate. ~ Sarah J. Maas

And I did it for Him and He loves them. He betrayed us! Do you know why they get to come back from the dead to slaughter more and more of us? I thought it was some demon's trick. That maybe we could fix that, too, or instead if our first mission failed." Now she's laughing at herself, at her naivety. "But He did it. Because He loves them. He loves the demons. He still loves them! After they sold their souls, after they've tortured the Templars and Beacons, and countless random innocents, He still loves them! He wants to give them time to change their minds before they're committed to hell. He wants to give those murdering bastards the ability to be redeemed. They slaughtered my family, bathed in the blood of my friends, and He still loves them." She looks at me and I see in her expression so much pain, so much bitterness, so much rage that I would have stepped back, had the demons not been holding me in place. The darkness that has taken over her personality since she became a demon becomes suddenly clear. After everything she has sacrificed to His cause she can't understand how He can forgive her enemies.

But I do.

I do and it hits me with the force of a train. ~ Eliza Crewe

Is that what you wanted to hear?"
"No."
The man reached over, took hold of the lantern and blew it out. Night enveloped the barn. "Well," he said at last to the darkness between them, "that's when you know it's the truth. ~ Hannah Tinti

I pulled the loaded gun out of my coat, most people were the worst for wear with the drink, although I was well known and easily recognised with the big scar down my face. Well, didn't I go and let both barrels off at the streetlight, it exploded into pieces and the front of the pub went into darkness. ~ Stephen Richards

I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness. ~ Mary Balogh

At the top of the cellar steps Broadman knelt down and fumbled in his tinderbox. It turned out to be damp.
'I'll kill that bloody cat,' he muttered, and groped for the spare box that was normally on the ledge by the door. It was missing. Broadman said a bad word. A lighted taper appeared in mid-air, right beside him.
HERE, TAKE THIS.
'Thanks,' said Broadman.
DON'T MENTION IT.
Broadman went to throw the taper down the steps. His hand paused in mid-air. He looked at the taper, his brow furrowing. Then he turned around and held the taper up to illuminate the scene. It didn't shed much light, but it did give the darkness a shape ...
'Oh, no - ' he breathed.
BUT YES, said Death. ~ Terry Pratchett

In the attempt to find the just measure of horror and terror, I came upon the writing of Carole Gill whose work revealed a whole new dimension to me. The figure of the gothic child was there. Stoker's horror was there. Along with the romance! At the heart of her writing one stumbles upon a genuine search for that darkness we lost with the loss of Stoker."

~Dr. Margarita Georgieva ~ Gothic Readings in The Dark ~ Carole Gill

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself. ~ Stephen King

My husband is such a healthy eater. Except when it comes to sweets. He never consumes anything except fruit until noon. And then from noon on he might have some brown rice and some tofu, and then, come eight or nine at night, he orders three mud-pie double-chocolate pieces of cake and eats all three of them. ~ Sara Blakely

We live on a spinning rock suspended in darkness, which evolves around a dying star. Our spinning rock was once ruled and owned by gigantic reptiles, all over! In sea, land, and air, gigantic reptiles roamed! Then a smaller rock fell from the sky and made a hole in the ground, so big that all the giant reptiles died! We live on a spinning rock we got from dragons flying through the air, and on this rock we kill each other over things like religion and money! And on this rock we make friends, we fall in love, we work hard to earn papers so we can buy things. On this rock we have dreams at night that remind us of beautiful places we have never been to, beautiful wonders we have never imagined before... we write stories and we make books, we try to travel to other rocks around us, we wonder if anyone else is out there. Our planet, and our existence as a human species, is bizarre! Our reality is bizarre! What we think is normal, when spelled out, is not normal at all. It's only normal because we are familiar with it. We are residents of a universe that is expanding at a rate of more than 5 billion meters per every few seconds, forming new realities and new substances with each expansion! We will never become familiar with even the very tip of what actually is! So why are any of us afraid of the possibilities of what could be? Why does this frighten us, why does this scare us? When we actually never know anything at all! ~ C. JoyBell C.

The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian, and Polish, and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles. ~ Pete Hamill

At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment. ~ Thomas Mann

Good. So you may be dense, but you're not an idiot.'
'How can you even talk to me like that? Don't you know I can summon zombies and skeletons and –'
'Right now you couldn't summon a wishbone without melting into a puddle of darkness, di Angelo,' Will said. 'I told you, no more Underworldy stuff, doctor's orders. You owe me at least three days of rest in the infirmary. Starting now.'
Nico felt like a hundred skeletal butterflies were resurrecting in his stomach. 'Three days? I – I suppose that would be okay. ~ Rick Riordan

There is a sort of consolation at the contemplation of the yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lie darkness and obscurity. Edmond ~ Alexandre Dumas