Lamplight Quotes

Bright lamplight bounced off golden varnished wood. The suddenly vivid colors of scarves, hats, hair and faces after the gray-green gloom they'd been immersed in all morning dazzled them. The solid warmth of the coal-fired range, dry and hot, pressed against them from the front as the lingering damp embedded in their backs brought forth a final, convulsive shiver. The sights and smells of rich food and aromatic coffee hit them, no longer just a hope in their hollow stomachs. This made them all as if drunk with good fortune and delighted them with sheer, physical pleasure. ~ Antonio Dias

As they walked, the subtle lamplight of a dirigible washed over them. Finley glanced up, watching the light grow closer, slowly descending from the sky in a whirl of propellers as the ship made its way into the London air dock just a few miles away. How amazing it must be to float so high, to travel so quickly.
Dandy followed her gaze, but they didn't stop walking. "I was up in one of them flyers once," he told her. "I climbed over the rail and hung on to one of the ropes. Freeing it was. I almost let go."
She whipped her head around to gape at him. "The fall would kill you."
He smiled ever so slightly. "Not afore I flew. Worse ways to go. ~ Kady Cross

Hope, though; now there's a real pest. Hope doesn't just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there's a nice job in your brother-in-law's tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there's no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you're miserable and in pain, but Hope won't let you go. She's a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I've made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there's nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush.

Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn't go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn't going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy'll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn't really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a f ~ K.J. Parker

And when wine has soaked Cupid's drunken wings,
he's stayed, weighed down, a captive of the place.
...
Wine rouses courage and is fit for passion:
care flies, and deep drinking dilutes it.
...
Don't trust the treacherous lamplight overmuch:
night and wine can harm your view of beauty.
Paris saw the goddesses in the light, a cloudless heaven,
when he said to Venus: 'Venus, you win, over them both.'
Faults are hidden at night: every blemish is forgiven,
and the hour makes whichever girl you like beautiful.
Judge jewellery, and fabric stained with purple,
judge a face, or a figure, in the light. ~ Ovid

Watch now," Handful told her. "This rabbit goes under the log, and this rabbit goes over the log. You make them hop like that all the way down. See, that's how you make a plait - hop over, hop under." Nina took possession of the rabbits and the log and created a remarkably passable braid. Handful and I oohed and ahhed as if she'd carved a Florentine statue. It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet predictability: the room flushed with lamplight, a fire nesting on the grate, an early dark flattening against the windows, while my two companions fussed over me at the dresser. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

He walked from one end of the basement to the other, the lamplight magnifying his shadow. It turned him into a giant on the wall, walking back and forth. When he stopped pacing, his shadow loomed behind him, watching. Someone was always watching. ~ Markus Zusak

Have you seen lamplight shine through dusty air, setting the dust motes on fire?" He waved a hand. "Imagine that, spread across the night sky - but ten thousand motes and ten thousand times brighter, glittering like the eyes of all the gods. ~ Rosamund Hodge

I am in awe of Sam's decision to abandon capitals and punctuation but am not brave enough to do the same. I like to imagine the day he, as the Americans say, made the change he wished to see in the world. I like to think it came to him suddenly. Perhaps he was swimming - no, too active - or napping indoors on a hot day - no, too bourgeois - probably he was in Scotland during the midge season and he left the desk lamp on and the window open when he went out for a meaningful walk. It was dark and the midges were drawn to the lamplight and - thinking it was the moon - fried themselves against the bulb, falling in their tens and tens, cooked on the pages of Sam's poems. So when he returned some time later, with bites on his neck, he found his poems loaded with punctuation, asterisks, grammar lying dead on his manuscript and his instant reaction was disgust, a feeling that then infected his whole aesthetic. ~ Joe Dunthorne

The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live - that is, keep comfortably warm - and die in New England at last. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Oscar's breath warmed the back of her head, his lips brushing against her hair, loosened from a braid. He drew a lock away from her neck and kissed the skin just beneath her earlobe, against the throb of her quickening pulse. Like the blackness outside the dome of lamplight, there seemed to be nothing more in the world than his lips, his touch, and the flood of heat consuming her.
With a gentle nudge, Oscar turned her toward him. He looked at her the way he had in the Grampains meadow-as if she was the most fascinating woman he'd ever seen. Under his gaze she felt fascinating, too. Capivating…wanted. He traced her jaw with his lips, kissing the angle of her neck ever so tenderly, as though he weren't certain she wanted him, too. Camille closed the inch of space left between them, her body pressing against his. The muscles in his chest and arms tightened. He was wanted, and she needed to show him how much. No one was there to watch, no one to judge, or tell her the lips caressing her were unworthy of tasting her skin.
With those very thoughts, Oscar's grip loosened. His lips retreated.
"This isn't right," he whispered, catching his breath.
Camille stared at him, her hurt and disappointment plain on her face.
"You're engaged, Camille." He looked around the room. His eyes rested on the bed. "I shouldn't be here."
All of a sudden, Camille completely and fully detested Randall. Good, sweet, well-meaning Randall infuriated her with his mere existence, ~ Angie Frazier

He had no friends and for the first time in his life he became aware of loneliness. Sometimes, in his attic room at night, he would look up from a book he was reading and gaze in the dark corners of his room, where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and intently, the darkness gathered into a light, which took the insubstantial shape of what he had been reading. ~ John Williams

The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious. ~ Donna Tartt

I want the words you hold in your hand, lamplight in a jar. ~ Alice Hoffman

They'd dueled in the lamplight of her kitchen that night, savaging each other with accusations that could never be recalled. Now, he couldn't remember half of what they'd said, only the colors and lights and seething tide of fear all around them. He could still taste the acrid burn of unfairness. ~ Lauren Gilley

Madame Defarge immediately called to her husband that she would get them, and went, knitting, out of the lamplight, through the courtyard ~ Charles Dickens

Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium ...
Something had happened. The black sky above London burst into fragments: white triangles, squares and lines - the silent geometric delirium of searchlights. The blinded elephant buses rushed somewhere headlong with their lights extinguished. The distinct patter along the asphalt of belated couples, like a feverish pulse, died away. Everywhere doors slammed and lights were put out. And the city lay deserted, hollow, geometric, swept clean by a sudden plague: silent domes, pyramids, circles, arches, towers, battlements. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Come quickly with me.
Inhale the divine that swoops
from nostril to blunted throat
then sneaks past guarded doors
into the hallway of your heart
where the lamplight grows. ~ Merle Nudelman

He was very still, and turned toward me. I knew he was looking at me but I could not look back. "What is it like?" he said at last. "Seeing the dead."

An old woman walked by, huddled into a thick coat, her footsteps splashing through the reflected lamplight on the street. "Like plunging your hand into a bucket of worms in the dark," I said. "Except it's inside your mind. It's repellent, and cold, and you don't know what you're touching because you can't see - you don't know what it looks like, and you don't want to know."

"Jesus, Ellie," James said. I turned to him to find his face stark in the harsh lamplight. "Gloria did that for a living."

"So did my mother," I said.

So do I. ~ Simone St. James

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare. ~ Yoshida Kenko

The child, in love with prints and maps,
Holds the whole world in his vast appetite.
How large the earth is under the lamplight!
But in the eyes of memory, how the world is cramped! ~ Charles Baudelaire

The snow came after two o' clock. It fell faintly in the cones of lamplight, descending like fleets or fairies through the cold sky. I was awake - the only one in town, I was sure - and I was sure those miniature fallen sylphs were for me and my personal delectation. They came for me, because nature likes a saint. They settled on my window sill, they collected on the dark grass of my lawn, they danced and whirled in the wind gusts before my eyes. I put my hand to the windowpane to greet it, the first snow. By the time I woke in the morning, I saw that after the snow had come to me, it had visited everyone. ~ Joshua Gaylord

A man sat alone under the lamplight, hunched over the desk, listening to the rain on the nearby shuttered window while he worked. He looked up from his project when he heard a noise over the water dripping off the roof. It was the sound of footsteps in the private courtyard outside, and then the echo of a door slamming shut.
The man rose silently and moved to the window, opened the shutters a few inches, and looked down, his right hand hovering over the grip of the Glock pistol in his waistband ~ Mark Greaney

Milla put her hands on his ribs, holding on as he braced his weight on one arm while with his other hand he guided his penis to her and in the same rough motion pushed deep inside.
He froze in place, his breath panting between his parted lips as they stared at each other. She couldn't move; the feel of him inside her was too sharp, almost painful in its intensity. Their gazes met in the mellow lamplight, and she was mesmerized by the tension in his face, the way his steely muscles were locked as if he didn't dare move. It built and built, that clawing need, and yet she remained poised on the razor's edge of something she knew she couldn't control. His chest suddenly heaved on a convulsive breath, and he moved in a long, deep stroke that took him all the way to the hilt. ~ Linda Howard

So imagine a fire going
wood snapping the way it does when it's a little green - the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains
and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys
and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning.
And so you dare to be happy.
You do that thing.
You dare. ~ Steven Millhauser

The lamplight gleamed on the Magus' white grin. People like to watch the pretty puppets, Superior. Even a glimpse of the puppeteer can be most upsetting for them. Why, they might even suddenly notice the strings around their own wrists ~ Joe Abercrombie

Was it worth while to lay
with infinite exertion
a roof I can't live under?
- All those blueprints,
closings of gaps,
measurings, calculations?
A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.
I'm naked, ignorant,
a naked man fleeing
across the roofs
who could with a shade of difference
be sitting in the lamplight
against the cream wallpaper
reading - not with indifference
about a naked man
fleeing across the roofs. ~ Adrienne Rich

We are far from liking London well enough till we like its defects: the dense darkness of much of its winter, the soot on the chimney-pots and everywhere else, the early lamplight, the brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms in Oxford Street or the Strand on December afternoons.
There is still something that recalls to me the enchantment of children - the anticipation of Christmas, the delight of a holiday walk - in the way the shop-fronts shine into the fog. It makes each of them seem a little world of light and warmth, and I can still waste time in looking at them with dirty Bloomsbury on one side and dirtier Soho on the other. ~ Henry James

Here is my room, in the yellow lamplight and the space heater rumbling: Indian rug red as Cochise's blood, a desk with seven mystic drawers, a chair covered in material as velvety blue-black as Batman's cape, an aquarium holding tiny fish so pale you could see their hearts beat, the aforementioned dresser covered with decals from Revell model airplane kits, a bed with a quilt sewn by a relative of Jefferson Davis's, a closet, and the shelves, oh, yes, the shelves. The troves of treasure. On those shelves are stacks of me: hundreds of comic books- Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four ... The shelves go on for miles and miles. My collection of marbles gleams in a mason jar. My dried cicada waits to sing again in the summer. My Duncan yo-yo that whistles except the string is broken and Dad's got to fix it. ~ Robert McCammon

Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. ~ Jack Kerouac

How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper. ~ W.G. Sebald

No healthy young man could fail to be stirred and set off-kilter by Aline, who, at the age of seventeen, had become the loveliest girl on God's green earth.
At the moment Aline was already dressed for bed, wearing a nightgown made of intricately tucked and ruffled white cotton. As she moved across the room, the lamplight silhouetted the generous curves of her breasts and hips through the thin fabric, and slid over the shining sable locks of her hair. Aline's looks were the kind that caused the heart to stop and the breath to catch. Her coloring alone would have given even a homely woman the appearance of great beauty. But her features were fine and perfect, and perpetually lit with the radiance of unchecked emotion. And as if all that hadn't been quite enough, nature had added one last flourish, a tiny black mark that flirted with the corner of her mouth. McKenna had fantasized endlessly about kissing that tantalizing spot, and following it to the lush curves of her lips. Kissing and kissing her, until she was weak and shivering in his arms. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Silence. First it's a cloud of apricot trees in flower, yellow or ivory, like a thousand little butterflies sown in the fresh grass, moving in the glow of lamplight when night ascends. Fragments of dreams. You can see the red sun setting on the foliage, like an enormous mass of incandescent steel.

Then there were the trees a little farther off, straightening their fragile frames, the woolen blue pincushion flower like an eye and that tumult of milk in the deep stone, and finally the moan of the air beaten by a flock of blue woodpigeons– a silken challenge perhaps, or one of crackled leather. ~ Deborah Heissler

It was snowing. In the lamplight, blades of ice were growing on the outside of the blue-tinged window-panes and the hoarfroast, like melted sugar, glittered on the gold-spangled bottle-glass of the windows. Absolute silence enveloped the little house as it slumbered in the shadows.
Des Esseintes let his mind wander ... Like some great hanging of reverse ermine, the sky rose before him, black and dappled with white. An icy wind gusted, intensifying the wild scudding of the snow, inverting the proportions of black and white. The heraldic hanging of the sky turned itself over, becoming true white ermine, itself dappled with black by the tiny patches of night strewn among the snowflakes. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

There's nothing more lovely than your lamplight, seen from a dark street ... ~ John Geddes

If I could stay
in one moment of time
it would be this one –

You sitting across the room
with the warm lamplight soaking you,

looking at me
the way softened and still hungry people do. ~ Emery Allen

No one can really claim to know politics properly until he has stayed up all night writing a speech for delivery the following day. While the world sleeps, the orator paces by lamplight, wondering what madness ever brought him to this occupation in the first place. Arguments are prepared and discarded. The exhausted mind ceases to have any coherent grip upon the purpose of the enterprise, so that often--usually an hour or two after midnight--there comes a point where failing to turn up, feigning illness, and hiding at home seem the only realistic options. And then, somehow, just asa panic and humiliation beckon, the parts cohere, and there it is: a speech. A second-rate orator now retires gratefully to bed. A Cicero stays up and commits it to memory. ~ Robert Harris

Then came the matter of food. For ten hours he picked grains of rice off the floor and collected pasta, sugar, and individual tea leaves. He would not eat anything that had been tainted with blood, and was left with less than a third of his rations. Some things - powdered cocoa, for example - were uncollectible, or had risen on the wind. He had kerosene enough for one pot of boiling water and one hour of lamplight each day. Some of his blankets had bullet holes. ~ Mark Helprin

Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart - her sinful, tanned heart - for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast. ~ Virginia Woolf

So that she could be by his side, make him smile as she laughed, weave tales by lamplight, and share secrets in the dark. So that she could fall asleep in his arms and awaken to a brilliant tomorrow. ~ Renee Ahdieh

[My grandfather] returned to what he called 'studying.' He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life's burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession. ~ Wendell Berry

I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stand on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks, "Will my mouth always be like this?" she asks. "Yes," I say, "it will. It is because the nerve was cut." She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. "I like it," he says, "It is kind of cute." "All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works. ~ Richard Selzer

The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this. I could lose myself forever in that singular little face, in the pessimism of her beautiful mouth. When I imagined these phrases cast in her voice, they were almost intolerably sweet; now, sitting right beside her, it was unthinkable that I should voice them myself. ~ Donna Tartt

Outside the snow was falling. In the lamplight icy leaf-patterns could be seen glittering on the blue-black windows, and hoar-frost sparkled like melted sugar in the hollows of the bottle-glass panes, all splattered with gold.
The little house, lying snug and sleepy in the darkness, was wrapped in a deep silence. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Be quiet, Ash. I am trying to remember you."
In the lamplight, shadows collected on his face as his eyebrows drew down. He must have taken her meaning, because he shook his head. "Well. I am trying to have you." His voice was fiercely possessive. "Not for one night, nor even two. I want you every evening - mine outright, not a few hours stolen here or there. I want you during the day, on my arm. I want to know that when we're apart you're missing me; I want to know when we're together, I'm the one who puts the smile on your face." He punctuated each phrase with a kiss - against her chin, the line of her jaw, the hollow of her neck. ~ Courtney Milan

REGRET FOR PEONY FLOWERS

I'm saddened by the peonies before the steps, so red,
As evening came I found that only two remained.
Once morning's winds have blown, they surely won't survive,
At night I gaze by lamplight, to cherish the fading red. ~ Bai Juyi

A while later Catch woke to the sound of the bathroom door opening. Hallie emerged wearing a white bathrobe, which hung suggestively low, revealing the slender line of her neck where it met her perfect collarbone. Her hair was damp and her skin shone ethereally in the golden glow of the lamplight, smooth, flawless, like porcelain polished to perfection.
She smiled and for a moment Catch was left breathless. ~ Sean J. Quirk

I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain. ~ Willa Cather

Gray waited a full verse before approaching her, prowling around her periphery and coming to rest behind her right shoulder. A few of the men gave him friendly nods, but most were too absorbed in their spirits and song to pay him any mind.
"What are you doing?" she asked, flicking him a glance through the swaying lamplight.
"Who, me?" he murmured. "I'm simply leaning against the foremast. You know, this tall bit of timber you weren't to go past."
She sipped her drink.
Gray pushed off the mast and crouched at her side. If she'd turn and look at him, they would be eye-to-eye. But she didn't. "The better question is, what the hell are you doing?"
"I'm enjoying myself," she said lightly, taking another drink. "I suggest you do the same." She passed the tankard to him and applauded with wild enthusiasm as the song came to its tuneless end.
Gray peered at the half-empty tankard, then lifted it to his nose and sniffed. Straight, unadulterated rum, the girl was drinking. That would explain the enthusiasm. Her applause concluded, she snatched the tankard back and downed a swallow to do a sailor proud.
Bloody hell. Gray suspected the only thing worse than watching over a prim governess would be watching over a soused one. ~ Tessa Dare

his head burst in a blizzard of seeds that hung in the lamplight and drifted slowly to the ground like a tiny division of poison paratroopers. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

The exhaustion apparent in his slumped shoulders made her heart twist. He looked so tired she wanted to rub his back and stroke his hair, as a mother would for a child. This was natural compassion, she decided, and walked toward him to give him what comfort she could.
He finally heard her and lifted his head from his arms. Locks of sandy hair fell over his forehead and he looked up at her with deep indigo eyes. Even in the dim light, she could see pain etched across his features. What horrors stalked his dreams? What could she do to help him sleep peacefully?
For a long moment they gazed at one another and then Huiann rested her hand on his shoulder. At the same time, Alan leaned into her body. They came together like two halves of an eggshell carefully broken. He slid a hand around her waist and pulled her closer. His face pressed against her breast. His arms wrapped around her.
She held him, cradling his head, rubbing his back. His body was so warm in her embrace. Her heart beat steadily and her stomach flipped in slow, lazy somersaults. The moment she'd sensed coming for so long was here. What would happen next?
For a long time, they remained locked in perfect union, contented, safe, no longer alone. As she caressed his hair, soft as she'd imagined, he tilted his face to look up at her. His eyes glittered in the lamplight. He wanted more and Huiann realized she did too. ~ Bonnie Dee

The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.

With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

His hand sliced through the air in a silencing motion, and he stalked to the window. "Have you seen any rats?"
Her mind spun at the sudden shift of subject. "Rats?"
"Rodents that resemble large mice."
"I know what rats are," she gritted out. "Why?"
"They're spies." He peered through the curtain into the darkness. Thick fog diffused the yellow lamplight, creating an eerie glow on the street below. "Have you seen any?"
Rodent spies? The man might be hot as hell, but he was a loon. As inconspicuously as possible, Cara inched toward the door. "I didn't see any furry little James Bonds. ~ Larissa Ione

The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture--the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness
in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log. ~ Kenneth Grahame

Ebook readers might cause problems. This has become a controversial topic as more and more people use and love ereaders. A close friend of mine doesn't go anywhere without her Kindle and will probably be buried with it. A Wolf, she was dismayed when I shared the findings of a new Harvard Medical School study:23 reading an ebook in the hour before bed delayed sleep more than reading a print book under normal lamplight, and it also increased sleep inertia the next day. ~ Michael Breus

I have been
hanging here
headless
for so long
that the body has forgotten
why
or where or when it
happened
and the toes
walk along in shoes
that do not
care

and although
the fingers
slice things and
hold things and
move things and
touch
things
such as
oranges
apples
onions
books
bodies
I am no longer
reasonably sure
what these things
are

they are mostly
like
lamplight and
fog

then often the hands will
go to the
lost head
and hold the head
like the hands of a
child
around a ball
a block
air and wood -
no teeth
no thinking part

and when a window
blows open
to a
church
hill
woman
dog
or something singing

the fingers of the hand
are senseless to vibration
because they have no
ears
senseless to color because
they have no
eyes
senseless to smell
without a nose

they country goes by as
nonsense
the continents

the daylights and evenings
shine
on my dirty
fingernails

and in some mirror
my face
a block to vanish
scuffed part of a child's
ball

while everywhere
moves
worms and aircraft
fires on the land
tall violets in sanctity
my hands let go let go
Charles Bukowski

For most people bedtime was early, although Cicero admitted to writing speeches or books and reading papers at night (there was a Latin word for it, lucubrare - to work by lamplight). ~ Anthony Everitt

Well, I've always read in bed, in early years by candlelight, succeeded by lamplight, gaslight, and now electric light, and I'll probably be found dead there with some ponderous tome or book of poems on my chest and a seraphic smile of peace and contentment smoothing out all the ugliness of my visage... ~ E. Norman Torry

Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty now) as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands, compassion, comprehension, absolution. So, he thinks, may I never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with the rest. ~ Virginia Woolf

They powdered their wigs, too. One could choke on the arsnenic and talcum. I can't imagine it was good for the lungs of living, but one does what one must for fashion. At least the women weren't tottering around on five-inch heels, constantly in peril of berking bones." He paused a moment, then said, "What made it easier for vampires was that we lived by candlelight, lamplight - it makes everyone look healthier, even the sick. The harsh lights you favour now ... well. Difficult. I heard that a few vampires have taken to those spray-tanning salons, to get the proper skin tones." -Myrnin ~ Rachel Caine

Walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the same street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of wheels. ~ Geoff Nicholson

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world. ~ Diane Setterfield

That night, she was neglecting her pen in favor of rereading one of the most-favored books in her library. It was a small volume that had appeared mysteriously when she was only fifteen. Josephine still had no idea who had gifted her the lovely horror of Carmilla, but she owed her nameless benefactor an enormous debt. Her personal guess was a briefly employed footman who had seen her reading her mother's well-worn copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho and confessed his own forbidden love of Poe. The slim volume of Le Fanu's Gothic horror stories had been hidden well into adulthood. As it wasn't her father's habit to investigate her reading choices, concealment might have been more for dramatic effect than real fear of discovery. Josephine read by lamplight, curled into an old chaise and basking in the sweet isolation of darkness as she mouthed well-loved passages from her favorite vampire tale.

"For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me."

She slammed the book shut. How had she turned so morbid? For while Josephine had long known she would not live to old age, she thought she had resigned herself to it. She made a point of figh ~ Elizabeth Hunter

Nothing can bring the hurt of loneliness upon a man so swiftly as to pass a strange house in the dark and witness, in the lamplight from within, a family breaking evening bread together. ~ Og Mandino

He ascended the mountain in darkness, no lamplight, a world black and silver and blue. The moon lay scattered through the woods in blades, glowing palely, the wind rising now and again to moan through the trees. The trail scrawled ever upward, toward the looming darkness of the mountain's peak. Above it all the sea of night, the strange ornamentation of stars. ~ Taylor Brown

Knives,' muttered Calder, 'and threats, and bribes, and war?'

Bayaz' eyes shone with the lamplight. 'Yes?'

'What kind of a fucking wizard are you?'

'The kind you obey. ~ Joe Abercrombie

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. ~ James Joyce

The night following the reading, Gansey woke up to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn't certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved.
Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. "Make it stop," he said.
Ronan's room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same weak, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he'd seen a scythe.
The ragged sound cut through the apartment again.
"What fresh hell is this?" Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air.
Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted bac ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam ... and after a while they will fall to dust and rain; or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; and hew rock out of the earth, and build them again. ~ Conrad Aiken

With Penge I associate my first realisations of the wonder and beauty of twilight and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the mystery of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of railway trains and railway signals lit up in the darkness. ~ H.G.Wells

What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunlight. ~ Joseph Joubert

Fillette." He twisted his upper body toward her, so he could put both arms around her, press her back against the pillows and blot out the lamplight with his shoulder. "I only ever want to love you because it's you, and it's me, and I can't help myself." He whispered against her neck in French and she felt herself melting. ~ Lauren Gilley

How generous is your mistress,' said the light, mocking voice of Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Vishnevetsky, 'who said that as your guest I might hunt where I pleased.'

Half veiled by the blossom, he leaned against the opposite wall: a man strongly made with cleft chin and soft chestnut hair and moustache, and all the arts of a courtier. In his hands was a small Turkish bow; and across the spangled silk of his shirt hung a quiver. He smiled as he ceased speaking, and bending the bow, took aim, lightly, at a fluttering host of birds calling from the cherry tree over his head.

The Voevoda smiled. 'I am more generous still,' he said, and drew back his arm, the fingers brushing his girdle. A flick of silver, arching through the air, touched Vishnevetsky's bow with a click, and the Prince made a sound, cut off at once, as he stumbled off-balance, the sliced wood and hemp whipping about him: his arms flung involuntarily apart. Lymond's knife, its chased hilt gold in the lamplight, lay on the cracked tiles at his feet. Lymond said, 'I give you both weapon and quarry. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting. ~ Edgar Degas

And yours? What is your opinion? Truly?" She turned to face me, her green eyes brilliant in the lamplight. "Would it matter?"
"No. I love him and, damn the world, I will have him."
She grinned. "Good girl. And since my opinion doesn't matter, I give it freely: Brisbane is worth twenty Marches and dearer to me than most of my own brothers. If you do not marry him, I will do so myself, simply to keep him in the family."
I turned away quickly. "Are you weeping?" she asked.
"Don't be absurd." My voice was muffled and I swallowed, blinking furiously. "I have a cinder in my eye." Portia dropped a swift kiss to my cheek. "Happiness is within your grasp now, pet. Hang onto it, and do not let it go, whatever you do. ~ Deanna Raybourn

Her own awareness had risen like the dawn on her back.Like a leaden sunrise veiled in a swirl of storm clouds. It was no longer enough to have answers for Shiva's sake. Indeed, it had ceased to be about mere vengeance the moment Khalid's lips touched hers in the alley by the souk. She had wanted there to be a reason for this madness, needed there to be a reason, so that she could be with him. So that she could be by his side, make him smile as she laughed, weave tales by lamplight, and share secrets in the dark.So that she could fall asleep in his arms and awaken to a brilliant tomorrow.
But it was too late. He was the Mehrdad of her nightmares. She had opened the door. She had seen the bodies hanging from the walls, without explanation. Without justification.
And without one, Shahrzad knew what must be done. Khalid had to answer for such vile deeds. Such rampant death.
Even if he was her air.
Even if she loved him beyond words. ~ Renee Ahdieh

Lamplight, console me till then, harbinger warm of the night. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Wandering, ever wandering,
Because life holds not anything so good
As to be free of yesterday, and bound
Towards a new to-morrow ; and they wend
Into a world of unknown faces, where
It may be there are faces waiting them,
Faces of friendly strangers, not the long
Intolerable monotony of friends.

The joy of earth is yours, O wanderers,
The only joy of the old earth, to wake,
As each new dawn is patiently renewed,
With foreheads fresh against a fresh young sky.
To be a little further on the road,
A little nearer somewhere, some few steps
Advanced into the future, and removed
By some few counted milestones from the past;
God gives you this good gift, the only gift
That God, being repentant, has to give.

Wanderers, you have the sunrise and the stars;
And we, beneath our comfortable roofs,
Lamplight, and daily fire upon the hearth,
And four walls of a prison, and sure food.
But God has given you freedom, wanderers. ~ Arthur Symons