Moonlit Quotes

I went to the window, opening the pierced shutters to look out over the sleeping city. The moon was waxing and hung half-full like some exotic silver jewel just over the horizon. From the courtyard below rose the scent of jasmine on the cool night air. A slender vine had wound its way up to the balcony, and I reached out, pinching off a single creamy white blossom. I lifted it to my nose, drinking in the thick sweetness of it as it filled my head, sending my senses reeling. There was something narcotic about that jasmine, something carnal and ethereal at the same time. I crushed the petals between my fingers, taking the scent onto my skin. It was not a fragrance to wear alone. It was too rich, too heady, too full of sensuality and promise. It was a fragrance for silken cushions and damp naked flesh and moonlit beds. I rubbed at my fingers, but the scent clung tightly, keeping me company as I sat in the window, listening to a song I had almost forgot and thinking of Gabriel Starke and the five years that stretched barrenly between us. ~ Deanna Raybourn

I'm behaving like a pig,' she said happily. 'You always give me all the things I like best. I've never been so spoiled before.' She gazed across the terrace at the moonlit bay. 'I wish I deserved it.' Her voice had a wry undertone. 'What do you mean?' asked Bond surprised. 'Oh, I don't know. I suppose people get what they deserve, so perhaps I do deserve it.' She looked at him and smiled. Her eyes narrowed quizzically. 'You really don't know much about me,' she said suddenly. Bond was surprised by the undertone of seriousness in her voice. ~ Ian Fleming

As he strode through the deserted city, he thought of the New Years of his childhood, before he was ten, before the Change, when the city had still glowed with the soft, deep enchantment of sugared angels spreading their sparkling wings in bakery windows, and bells whose limpid sounds rose like the sea at a moonlit tide, and glass ornaments turning slowly this way and that on dark tree branches, gathering in their reflections the whole wondrous, promise-filled world. ~ Olga Grushin

The next night was New Year's Eve, and I made a secret plan with Shara to meet her outside the back door on the stroke of midnight.
"Let's take a walk," I suggested.
"Sure. It's midnight, minus five degrees, and pitch black, but hey, let's walk." She paused. "But not up Loyal," she added, smiling.
And so we walked together along a moonlit track.
Twenty yards and then I will make the move to kiss her, I told myself.
But plucking up the courage with a girl this special was harder than I had thought.
Twenty yards became two hundred yards. Then two thousand.
Forty-five minutes later, she suggested that maybe we should turn around and head back to the house.
"Yes. Good idea." I replied.
Do it, Bear, you old woman. Do it now!
And so I did.
A quick kiss on the lips, then a longer lingering one, and then I had to stop. It was sensory overload.
Wow. That was worth the walk, I thought, smiling from ear to ear.
"Let's head back," I confirmed, still smiling.
I am not sure Shara was quite as impressed by the effort-to-reward ratio--long cold walk to short, hot kiss--but as far as I was concerned the sky and clouds had parted, and nothing would ever be the same again. ~ Bear Grylls

Sweet moonlight, shining full and clear,
Why do you light my torture here?
How often have you seen me toil,
Burning last drops of midnight oil.
On books and papers as I read,
My friend, your mournful light you shed.
If only I could flee this den
And walk the mountain-tops again,
Through moonlit meadows make my way,
In mountain caves with spirits play -
Released from learning's musty cell,
Your healing dew would make me well! ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

VIII

'Farewell to barn and stack and tree,
Farewell to Severn shore.
Terence, look your last at me,
For I come home no more.

'The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood is dried;
And Maurice amongst the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.

'My mother thinks us long away;
'Tis time the field were mown.
She had two sons at rising day,
To-night she'll be alone.

'And here's a bloody hand to shake,
And oh, man, here's good-bye;
We'll sweat no more on scythe and rake,
My blood hands and I.

'I wish you strength to bring you pride,
And a love to keep you clean,
And I wish you luck, come Lammastide,
At racing on the green.

'Long for me the rick will wait,
And long will wait the fold,
And long will stand the empty plate,
And dinner will be cold.'

IX

On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.

A careless shepherd once would keep
The flocks by moonlight there,
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air.

They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn.
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men that die at morn.

There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, ~ A.E. Housman

You could wish for brighter moonlit skies
But from a fair distance, they all look pretty much like mere streetlights. ~ Sanhita Baruah

Weak Forces

I enjoy an accumulating
faith in weak forces--
a weak faith, of course,
easily shaken, but also
easily regained--in what
starts to drift: all the
slow untrainings of the mind,
the sift left of resolve
sustained too long, the
strange internal shift
by which there's no knowing
if this is the raod taken
or untaken. There are soft
affinities, possibly electrical;
lint-like congeries; moonlit
hints; asymmetrical pink
glowy spots that are no
the defeat of something,
I don't think. ~ Kay Ryan

Someday I want to go back to San Felipe de Jesus and find the Jesus in that place. Someday I want to trap myself in those washboard towns, Aconchi, Magdalena; I want to meet their saints someday. I would ask them if they have ever been in love.

I don't mean the syrup they lay on you in the media. I mean the meat of love, the hardness of it, the ice water that wakes you up into the heat of day. The Mexico of love, with rocks, pickup trucks, fat men and sugary children. Cock-sure, moonlit tequila, sweet lime, metallic bed for secret touching. Did they ever reach that side of life? Those mealy saints with their crosses on their backs, did they have enough stomach for the midnight lunch of love? ~ Laurie Perez

As I looked about the world, so much of it impoverished, I became increasingly uncomfortable about having so much while my brothers and sisters were starving. Finally I had to find another way. The turning point came when, in desperation and out of a very deep seeking for a meaningful way of life, I walked all one night through the woods. I came to a moonlit glade and prayed. ~ Peace Pilgrim

A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so. ~ Chinua Achebe

The pub door swings open when a man enters. A window of moonlit sky and sea illuminates the darkened pub, and a surge of cold ocean air charges its way inside. It's as if Cuchulainn's raging soul had passed through the doorway. ~ Laura Treacy Bentley

What was he like? Red Abed?" She was remarkable. Loyal and brave and beautiful as a ship under sail. We ran through moonlit gardens and defied an angry mob. "I spent an afternoon with him," Sparhawk said. "He was old and frail, but he had forgotten more about the sea than I shall ever know." And I will mourn his daughter all my days. ~ Donna Thorland

All I want in this life are three...
a moonlit beach on the starlit sea,
a breath of opium,
and thee. ~ Roman Payne

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. I looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog.
Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

bedroom, on her part of the soiled mattress, Dorthea stared out the window at a perfect moonlit view of Sunny Slope Manor. ~ Timothy Patrick

A clear sunny day can suddenly shift to thunder and lightning, a raging storm can suddenly give way to a bright moonlit night. The weather may be inconstant, but the sky remains the same. The substance of the human mind should also be like this. ~ Zicheng Hong

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy--or even the needlessness--but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday . . . if ice conditions had been normal . . . if the night had been rough or moonlit . . . if she had seen the berg 15 second sooner--or 15 seconds later . . . if she had hit the ice any other way . . . if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher . . . if she had carried enough boats . . . if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these "ifs" turned out right, every life might have been save. But they all went against her--a classic Greek tragedy. ~ Walter Lord

Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping finger of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins; the goddess, the freedom, the lure of all that wild striving in the valley. They ~ John Le Carre

(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray 'twilight of the reason,' on 'the borderland between experience and illusion. Howells's geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory/borderland was the familiar setting of the American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and the hereafter, between conscious and unconscious, 'experience and illusion' - psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying. ~ Howard Kerr

Shhhh," Johnny soothed, sliding his hands up and down her back, nuzzling her hair. "Car thieves don't cry, baby. You gotta toughen up if you're gonna have a future with good old Clyde here."

"I like it when you do that."

"What?"

"Call me baby," Maggie whispered.

"You liked it when I called you Bonnie too," he replied with a smile in his voice. "Why?"

"You used to call me baby all the time. It makes me believe you can love me again."

Johnny wrapped his arms tightly around her waist and lifted her to him, kissing her tear-streaked cheeks before he touched his lips to hers.

"I'm already there Maggie. I fell in love when you begged me to help you escape the cops. I fell in love when we danced to Nat King Cole singing 'Stardust' on a moonlit beach. Hell, I fell in love when you told me how blondes spell farm."

"E-I-E-I-O," Maggie quipped wetly.

Johnny laughed and held her tightly. ~ Amy Harmon

--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
'Perfectly harmless. . . .'

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
'Sure are big creatures.'
'It's awful plain.'
'Look! It's a she!'

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

'Curious creatures,'
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
'Look at that, would you.'
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline. ~ Elizabeth Bishop

There is not one single invention of (Nature's), however subtle or impressive it may be thought to be, that the human spirit cannot create; no forest of Fontainebleu or moonlit scene that cannot be produced with a floodlit stage set; no waterfall that hydraulics cannot imitate so perfectly as to be indistinguishable from the original; no rock that papier-mâché cannot copy; no flower that specious taffetas and delicately painted papers cannot rival! There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods-violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret. ~ John Galsworthy

..through you will call forth praise from lonesome travelers long after your name is forgotten. They will know someone lived and loved here.

'Whoever they were,' they will think, 'they belonged to God. It's clear that they believed the stories of Jesus were true, and it gave them a hope that made their lives beautiful in ways that will unfold for ages among the linnea that shimmers in the moonlit woods. ~ Andrew Peterson

A time when sky blue love bids farewell to the day and before dusk falls, the sunset ignites the smouldering embers of the moonlit soul... ~ Virginia Alison

I came up with a new reason
To write your name today
I plagiarized each letter
From a love note you wrote me.
The scent of ink was sacred to me
In that relapsed moment…
For a minute I could pretend
The paper reminded me of your skin;
I could pretend the glimmering ink
Was the moonlit lake
Of our summer night.
But the pretending crumpled with paper
And I threw us into the trash can
For the bridge between us is long burned
And it's time I accepted that. ~ Justin Wetch

Let me look right into your moonlit face, and dwell on every line and curve in it! ~ Thomas Hardy

When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so. [ ... ] But I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter's dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan. ~ Chinua Achebe

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember. The ~ H.P. Lovecraft

And the ship sailed onward, gliding serenely down the moonlit river toward the dark lands beyond. ~ Christopher Paolini

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night. ~ Carl Sandburg

The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokovs fascinating creations, possibly a word he invented. I said I associate Upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be a name of a dance- you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me". Manna suggested that the word upsilamba evoked the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. Nima added in parentheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from your class: an upsilamba to you too! For Azin it was a sound, a melody. Mahashid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting" Upsilamba" with each leap. For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name. Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh. And for Nassrin it was a magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasures. ~ Azar Nafisi

Sometimes love is taken away unjustly, but not until the very end do you stop believing and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure expectation against which failure and betrayal are contrasted like the dark shadows on a moonlit road. ~ Mark Helprin

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you. ~ Billy Collins

The weather turned cool a few weeks later, and that winter was when Mia had her accident. So that actually turned out to be the last time I went camping. But even if it weren't, I still think it would be the best trip of my life. Whenever I remember it, I just picture our tent, a little ship glowing in the night, the sounds of Mia's and my whispers escaping like musical notes, floating out on a moonlit sea. ~ Gayle Forman

Only with the wings of love
can you fly.
Only with the light of love
can you see the star
In a moonlit sky. ~ Debasish Mridha

Darkness has been and shall ever be. Long after the substances that fuel heat and light have burned away - giving out at the end of a brief, fragile course - an everlasting night shall reign. Imlod Nir considered this as he watched the last tendrils of smoke from the evening's fire stream lazily into the night air. They mingled with black leaves under a low, moonlit canopy before melding into the consuming void. ~ John William

Standing next to my car, I looked up at the dark sky, searching for stars through the moonlit clouds. I gave up the search and looked down at the dark sea of gravel in the parking lot. I imagined myself as one of the tiny rocks, sitting amongst a sea of others. Then, I realized it was worse than that. I was one among billions.
I thought "Even if I am going crazy, does it even matter? ~ Lindsay Bassett

I like the night beach. The full moon. The moonlit sand, the waves silvery in the brightness. Nature is sexy, and that makes me think God is alive and has very good taste. ~ Beth Ann Bauman

So who are you writing to?"
I hesitate. "Do you remember John Ambrose McClaren?"
He rolls his eyes. "Of course I remember John Ambrose McClaren. I had a crush on him in seventh grade."
"I had a crush on him in eighth!"
"Of course you did. We all did. In middle school you either liked John or you liked Peter. Those were the two main choices. Like Betty and Veronica. Obviously John is Betty and Peter's Veronica." He pauses. "Remember how John used to have that really endearing stutter?"
"Yes! I mourned it a little when it went away. It was so sweet. So boyish. And do you remember how his hair was the color of pale butter? Like, the way I bet freshly churned butter looks."
"I thought it was more like moonlit corn silk, but yeah. So how did he turn out?"
"I don't know…It's strange because there's the him I remember from middle school, and that's just my memory of him, but then there's the him now."
"Did you guys ever go out back then?"
"Oh no! Never."
"So that's probably why you're curious about him now."
"I didn't say I was curious."
Lucas gives me a look. "You basically did. I don't blame you. I'd be curious too."
"It's just fun to think about. ~ Jenny Han

I looked out the window at walls of moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we we were at the bottom of some, gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea ...
But, with whatever hindsight, I suppose the reason that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid progress through high, drifting cumulus is - read them again - at the very opposite of what we perceive on a liquid's tilting and untilting top, and so becomes the other privileged pole among the images of this study, this essay, this memoir.
Or perhaps, as it is only a clause whose syntactic place has been questioned by my own unscholarly researches, I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light, like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word motion. ~ Samuel R. Delany

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found? ~ William James

He waved and shouted, "All clear on the front! Also, to my fabulous faerie friends, good-bye and good riddance!" He let go of Carlee's hand, turned around, and dropped his pants.
Jack's brilliantly white, moonlit mooning of the unearthly crowd was strangely beautiful. Lend was less amused, rolling his eyes and muttering, "My mom's right there. Can't we send Jack, too? ~ Kiersten White

She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself. ~ Kate Chopin

The odd thing about a banana," Oliver Swithin mused as he chased the naked policewoman across the moonlit field, "is not that it's an excellent source of potassium, but that everybody seems to know it is. ~ Alan Beechey

Children are the only people who accept a mood of wonderment, who are ready to welcome a perfect miracle at any hour of the day or night. Only a child can entertain an angel unawares, or to meet Sir Launcelot in shining armor on a moonlit road. ~ Kenneth Grahame

I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know. The voice in my head keeps reciting these old principles of mine. The voice is his voice, and the voice is also my voice. And there are other voices, voices I have never heard before, voices that seem to be either dead or dying in a great moonlit darkness. More than ever, some sort of new arrangement seems in order, some dramatic and unknown arrangement
anything to find release from this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Cobbles and kettledrums! ... I hope this madness isn't going to end in a moonlit climb and broken necks. ~ C.S. Lewis

Walking under Dusk, Moonlit leaf shadows were cast on my skin from the trees above, every step I took was taking a step deeper into magic. Silent whispers of mystical mouthes pulling me in deeper. Then the lights from inside the house turned on. A few seconds later, the fence lights went on. Just like that, the leafy ghosts on my skin ran away and the faery voices ran home. It seems like the creations of man kill magic in so many ways - even the light bulb does this! Oh to be a race of people designing magical things, if someone could capture pieces of Moonlight and place it in a jar; or other things like that, then we could stop killing the magic and be filled with it instead. Or maybe we are already always filled with it. It's the bringing out that we have trouble with. Stop being a doorknob, darling! Be magical, instead! ~ C. JoyBell C.

I learned a history not then written in books but one passed from generation to generation on the steps of moonlit porches and beside dying fires in one-room houses, a history of great-grandparents and of slavery and of the days following slavery; of those who lived still not free, yet who would not let their spirits be enslaved. ~ Mildred D. Taylor

When, on a moonlit night, you see a wide village street with its peasant houses, haystacks, sleeping willows, tranquility enters the soul; in this calm, wrapped in the shade of night, free from struggle, anxiety and passion, everything is gentle, wistful, beautiful, and it seems that the stars are watching over it tenderly and with love, and that this is taking place somewhere unearthly, and that all is well. ~ Anton Chekhov

It was a clear, moonlit night a little after the tenth of the Eighth Month. Her Majesty, who was residing in the Empress's Office, sat by the edge of the veranda while Ukon no Naishi played the flute for her. The other ladies in attendance sat together, talking and laughing; but I stayed by myself, leaning against one of the pillars between the main hall and the veranda.
'Why so silent?' said Her Majesty. 'Say something. It is sad when you do not speak.'
'I am gazing at the autumn moon,' I replied.
'Ah yes,' she remarked. 'That is just what you should have said. ~ Sei Shonagon

The woods played on our imaginations the most after dark, in our dorms as we were trying to fall asleep. You almost thought then you could hear the wind rustling the branches, and talking about it seemed only to make things worse. I remember one night, when we were furious with Marge K.
she'd done something really embarrassing to us during the day
we chose to punish her by hauling her out of bed, holding her face against the window pane and ordering her to look up at the woods. At first she kept her eyes screwed shut, but we twisted her arms and forced open her eyelids until she saw the distant outline against the moonlit sky, and that was enough to ensure for her a sobbing night of terror. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

My hands tightened on her, and I again tried to memorize every part of this moment. There was such perfection in the way our bodies were wrapped together. It didn't seem possible that outside the sanctity of this moonlit car was a world we had to hide from, a world that wanted to tear us apart. The thought of what surrounded us made what was between us seem that much more fragile. ~ Richelle Mead

Maybe I owe you something too, human," she said, drawing her pistol. Butler almost reacted, but decided to give Holly the benefit of the doubt.

Captain Short plucked a gold coin from her belt, flicking it fifty feet into the moonlit sky. With one fluid movement, she brought her weapon up and loosed a single blast. The coin rose another fifty feet, then spun earthward. Artemis somehow managed to snatch it from the air. The first cool movement of his young life.

"Nice shot," he said. The previously solid disk now had a tiny hole in the center.

Holly held out her hand, revealing the still raw scar on her finger. "If it wasn't for you, I would have missed altogether. No mech-digit can replicate that kind of accuracy. So, thank you too, I suppose."

Artemis held out the coin.

"No," said Holly. "You keep it, to remind you."

"To remind me?"

Holly stared at him frankly. "To remind you that deep beneath the layers of deviousness, you have a spark of decency. Perhaps you could blow on that spark occasionally."

Artemis closed his fingers around the coin. It was warm against his palm.

"Yes, perhaps. ~ Eoin Colfer

no more than ten feet later I was faced with a picturesque clearing at the edge of a wide, still stream and I sucked in a small breath. I didn't know this place existed. If I'd known this place existed then I would have become one of those nature people who forage the woods for sustenance and bathe in moonlit pools. ~ Penny Reid

You know how you secretly worry that this is it, that it's all downhill from here? I know you do. You worry that the children will turn into hulking criminals; their scalps will turn odorless. You lie in bed now during a thunderstorm, two sleeping, moonlit faces pressed against you, fragrant scalps intoxicating you, the rain on the roof like hoofbeats, heartbeats - and the calamity of raising young children falls away because this is all you ever wanted. Now you boo-hoo noiselessly into the kids' hair because life is so beautiful and you don't want it to change. Enjoy it. But let me tell you - you won't believe it, but let me tell you anyway - you will watch them sleeping still and always: the illuminated down of their cheeks, their dark puffs of lips and dear, dark wedges of eyelashes, and you will feel exactly the way you feel now. Only better. ~ Catherine Newman

My wife comes into the room, shutting out the sun as she closes the door, and lays the wad of bills on the table in front of me. I can't look at her. I want to feel shame but I only feel a thin pleasure, like a fine layer of skin, puckered and white and soulless, floating on cooling milk. On another shore, perhaps, the desert has an ashen end; and forests are merely silent folded wings. On that shore poverty doesn't have an animal stink. And when we touch the face of another, we draw onto their skin a moonlit path, and not the metallic rust of our weakness and our fear. ~ Shobha Rao

Perhaps in the stillness of a summer night they will feel compelled to walk barefoot down a moonlit country
road and search for the magic that connects all beings in the Circle of Life. ~ Autumn Morning Star

(Moonlit nights)
On the beach of my thoughts
Full is overlooking some days..
,And it's flood ..
But, Isles is always coming
...
And the vision becomes clearly ~ Huda Aweys

Nothing touches your skin of sweat
(meltdown of oceanic kisses)
when the purple light
whispers to the moon
in silent moonlit clarity ~ Bear Step

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind. ~ Anton Chekhov

I grew up in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together. ~ Hal Borland

Shepherds buried the sun in the naked forest.
With a net of hair
A fisherman hauled the moon from the icy pond.

The pale man dwells
In a blue crystal, his cheek at rest against his stars,
Or he bows his head in crimson sleep.

But the black flight of birds always touches
The watcher, the holiness of blue flowers;
The nearby silence thinks forgotten things, extinguished angels.

Again the brow turns night in moonlit stone;
A radiant youth,
The sister appears in autumn and black putrefaction. ~ Georg Trakl

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

Andy kicked her way in, moonlit and angerstruck, doors shattering the decoration behind as she shouted at the shocked furniture: "Blyton Summer Fucking Detective Club! Anybody home?" Kerri and Nate came to flank her right after, rifles aimed at the horrified haunted house. Tim scurried between them, promenaded across the hall, stopped by a decorative suit of armor, and peed on it. ~ Edgar Cantero

I am running. I am running through moonlit woods, with branches ripping at my clothes and my feet catching in the snow-bowed bracken. ~ Ruth Ware

As I sit under the moonlit tree, your heart adorns me with the twinkle of stars. ~ Debasish Mridha

It was the moths that first revealed the change. Grey-tipped whispers in the moonlit night. Two or three here, a single one there. White ones slipping through the darkness, silent and seemingly harmless, but present. Growing in numbers until they erupted the quiet like flutters of falling ash. There was a music in their silence. The kind of music that attached itself to hums and vibrations in the waters of the earth.

The hums, the vibrations, all but imperceptible. With the dawn the moths vanished, leaving a broken land in their wake. The Elian River leaked out into fissures of streams and brooks that first appeared as watery cracks throughout the Faeran Valley. So small at first, we didn't recognize the difference.

But as the months and years passed, the Elian slipped further and deeper into the growing fractures of earth the moths had left. Trails of watery branches and veins that broke the ground until it couldn't sustain life any longer.

This is what we have against the Bremistans. The land is delicate now, brittle like old bones. And I fear it is aging beyond our ability to heal it.... ~ Debi Cimo

The Fever Bird

The fever bird sand out last night.
I could not sleep, try as I might.

My brain was split, my spirit raw.
I looked into the garden, saw

The shadow of the amaltas
Shake slightly on the moonlit grass

Unseen, the bird cried out its grief,
Its lunacy, without relief:

Three notes repeated closer, higher,
Soaring, then sinking down like fire

Only to breathe the night and soar,
As crazed, as desperate, as before.

I shivered in the midnight heat
And smelt the sweat that soaked my sheet.

And now tonight I hear again
The call that skewers though my brain,

The call, the brain-sick triple note--
A cone of pain stuck inits throat.

I am so tired I could weep.
Mad bird, for God's sake let me sleep

Why do you cry like one possessed?
When will you rest? When will you rest?

Why wait each night till all but I
Lie sleeping in the house, then cry?

Why do you scream into my ear
What no one else but I can hear? ~ Vikram Seth

I need beaches, and blackness, and moonlit nakedness. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The warden always seems to know which book to bring. When the sun is gunslinger blue, the warden brings a western. When rain slates against the towers and the world has gone hopeless with gray, it is Bible stories. When the halls ring with the cries of riot and the bars of my own cell rattle with pain, the warden drops a soft book on the floor, solace in its pages: the collected poems of Walt Whitman. And oh, my favorites, like the tastes of childhood. Every few months the warden passes me The White Dawn, and for a few precious days I traverse the open heavens on hard-packed moonlit snow and see the blue splashing arctic lights, and I fill my belly with frozen seal meat and laugh with my Inuit friends. ~ Rene Denfeld

What's sacred when the Thing is all the universe?
creeps to every soul like a vampire-organ singing behind
moonlit clouds -
poor being come squat
under bearded stars in a dark field in Peru
to drop my load - I'll die in horror that I die!
Not dams or pyramids but death, and we to prepare for that
nakedness, poor bones sucked dry by His long mouth
of ants and wind, & our souls murdered to prepare
His Perfection!
The moment's come, He's made His will revealed forever
and no flight into old Being further than the stars will not
find terminal in the same dark swaying port
of unbearable music
No refuge in Myself, which is on fire
or in the World which is His also to bomb & Devour!
Recognize His might! Loose hold
of my hands - my frightened skull
- for I had chose self-love -
my eyes, my nose, my face, my cock, my soul - and now
the faceless Destroyer!
A billion doors to the same new Being!
The universe turns inside out to devour me!
and the mighty burst of music comes from out the inhuman
door - ~ Allen Ginsberg

This is called the Great Snow Dance and it is done every year in Narnia on the first moonlit night when there is snow on the ground. Of course it is a kind of game as well as a dance, because every now and then some dancer will be the least little bit wrong and get a snowball in the face, and then everyone laughs. But a good team of dancers, Dwarfs, and musicians will keep it up for hours without a single hit. On fine nights when the cold and the drum-taps, and the hooting of the owls, and the moonlight, have got into their wild, woodland blood and made it even wilder, they will dance till daybreak. I wish you could see it for yourselves. ~ C.S. Lewis

That's what being a mother is, isn't it? Waiting for a rounded belly to tighten in readiness; listening for the sound of hunger in the moonlit hours; hearing an eager voice call even in the camouflage of traffic, loud music, and whirring machines. It's looking at every door, every phone, and every approaching silhouette and feeling that slight lift, that tickle of opportunity to be again - mother. ~ Nadia Hashimi

On a moonlit night, after a snowfall, or under cherry blossoms, it adds to our pleasure if, while chatting at our ease, we bring forth the wine cups. ~ Yoshida Kenko

Careful!
Even moonlit dewdrops,
If you're lured to watch,
Are a wall before the Truth.
- Sogyo ~ Sogyo

Is there anybody there? said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door. ~ Walter De La Mare

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball. ~ Anton Chekhov

Love is a sickness, A strange connection,
It's a big hobby, o sweet heart..!
Listened many stories,
From elders and wise persons,
But never believe,
Never thought,
Those stories are considerable,
Sitting on the throne of myself,
Never came to know...!
Above that throne, at too much height,
Somewhere
In the crowd of fairies,
In the Anklet of your feet,
In the Shadow of your tresses,
in your small village,
Sun, moon and all stars dance crazily..!
I never came to know all this, o sweetheart,
On the sound of your walking feet, on your pink smile,
On the movement of your eyebrows, on your lovely voice, on your killing eyes,
All flowers of garden care well, for a very little moment of closeness with you sacrifice their life,
I never came to know all this, o sweetheart…!
Moonlit after touching your body propagate everywhere,
Roses get the fragrance from your sweating, in the form of due drops,
I never came to know all this, o sweetheart…!
I was very confident, never face this,
Wise heart, will never be crazy,
but,
Then it happened, sweetheart..!
Felt very sad, sweet heart..!
Heart converted in to blood and started flowing, o sweet heart..!
Convinced too by the movement of your eyebrow,
Came for donation, became a recipient, o sweet heart..!
Convinced by the sayings of elders,
That,
Love is a sickness, a strange conn ~ Zia

Her whole body tenses, heaves, tries to scream, and her eyes burn with tears of frustration and terror.
In the moonlit shadows of her bedroom, she hears a cat begin to purr.
Kara runs, shaking, out into the short corridor.
The cats are black and white, ginger and gray, fat and starved. They sit on tables, on chairs, on tatami mats. One sits so still beside a lamp that it looks carved from wood. She wants her father, wants to go into his room and wake him, but three of them sit, barring his door.
As one, they follow her with their eyes as Kara weaves through the living room.
As one, they hiss.
As one, they begin to follow, stalking her. ~ Thomas Randall

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born ~ Jack Kerouac

Eponymous Clent- Wanted for thirty-nine cases of fraud, counterfeiting, selling, and circulating lewd and unlicensed literature, claiming to be the impecunious son of a duke, impersonating a magistrate, impersonating a horse doctor, breach of promise, forty-seven moonlit flits without payment of debts, robbing shrines, fleeing from justice before trial, stealing pies from windows and small furniture from inns, fabricating the Great Palthrop Horse Plague for purposes of profit, operating a hurdy-gurdy without a license. The public is advised against lending him money, buying anything from him, letting him rooms, or believing a word he says. Contrary to his professions, he will not pay you the day after tomorrow. ~ Frances Hardinge

Courage is a fleeting commodity and can be crushed effortlessly by a single fond memory of home. A backyard barbecue, a fragmented flashback to a moonlit dance with a beautiful girl--those are psychological bullets in combat. One glimpse of what has been makes a soldier yearn for what can be again. That yearning can be as caustic as acid. It burns away the resolve you need to get the job done.

One stray thought can paralyze just as effectively as a bullet in the spine. ~ Sean Parnell

He poisoned her with affection and compassion, and he taught her what it meant to play again. He gave her hope and tore down her past, all with a fierce laugh in those remarkable eyes. He had already taken her soul on an impossible moonlit flight. She might as well give him her shredded, useless heart too, since she hadn't been using it all these years. ~ Thea Harrison

The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars ... ~ Virginia Woolf

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace. ~ Aberjhani

She made a slow turn as she loosened her ponytail and shook her head; her hair streamed down her back like a glossy black waterfall. She finished her spin. Her focus landed on me, and the air caught in my throat. My Wolf stirred.
Clare.
Her body went rigid; her sultry gaze hardened as she stared at me.
Clare Walker. I'd know those moonlit eyes anywhere.
She ran and grabbed hold of the stage right pole. Her feet left the floor as she wrapped her legs around the brass and spun.
What in god's name is she doing working in a fucking strip club? ~ Elizabeth Morgan

I would characterize Moonlit Nights as a mix between Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's 'The Relic' and 'Congo' by Michael Crichton. If those books had a baby and that baby was a werewolf then that would be my book! ~ Jacob Parr

It was just a magnificent, India-ink night of moonlit clouds below and glimpses of the shimmering sea. What century are you in? he longed to ask her. ~ Suzanne Stroh

The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane. For a second they stood quite still, wands directed at each other's chests; then, recognizing each other, they stowed their wands beneath their cloaks and started walking briskly in the same direction. ~ J.K. Rowling

Witches cackle.
Goblins growl.
Spectres boo,
And werewolves howl.
Black cats hiss.
Bats flap their wings.
Mummies moan.
The cold wind sings.
Ogre's roar.
And crows, they caw.
Vampires bahahahaha.
Warlocks swish their moonlit capes.
Loch Ness monsters churn the lake.
Skeletons, they rattle bones
While graveyards crack the old headstones.
All the while the ghouls, they cry
To trick-or-treaters passing by.
Oh, the noise on Halloween;
It makes me want to scream! ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I fell into a restless sleep in which my dreams carried me away over misty valleys and moonlit woodlands toward a fairy glen, where I watched their beautiful midnight revels in silent awe as I whispered the words of my favorite poem. " 'You shall hear a sound like thunder, / And a veil shall be withdrawn, / When her eyes grow wide with wonder, / On that hill-top, in that dawn. ~ Hazel Gaynor

That was the night he got up and went to the boys' division; perhaps he was looking for his history in the big room where all the boys slept, but what he found instead was Dr. Larch kissing every boy a late good night. Homer imagined then that Dr. Larch had kissed him like that, when he'd been small; Homer could not have imagined how those kisses, even now, were still kisses meant for him. They were kisses seeking Homer Wells.
That was the same night that he saw the lynx on the barren, unplanted hillside - glazed with snow that had thawed and then refrozen into a thick crust. Homer had stepped outside for just a minute; after witnessing the kisses, he desired the bracing air. It was a Canada lynx - a dark, gunmetal gray against the lighter gray of the moonlit snow, its wildcat stench so strong Homer gagged to srnell the thing. Its wildcat sense was keen enough to keep it treading within a single leap's distance of the safety of the woods. The lynx was crossing the brow of the hill when it began to slide; its claws couldn't grip the crust of the snow, and the hill had suddenly grown steeper. The cat moved from the dull moonlight into the sharper light from Nurse Angela's office window; it could not help its sideways descent. It traveled closer to the orphanage than it would ever have chosen to come, its ferocious death smell clashing with the freezing cold. The lynx's helplessness on the ice had rendered its expression both terrified; and resigned; both madness and fatali ~ John Irving

The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. ~ Ian McEwan

My Name
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go. ~ Mark Strand

Stillness fell upon them, as weighty as a promise. The two of them walked in silence, along the still,

moonlit landscape, and through the drowsing trees. ~ Debotri Dhar

Your person, your slightest movements seemed to me to possess a superhuman importance in the world. My heart used to raise like the dust in your footsteps. The effect you had on me was that of a moonlit night in summer, when all is perfume, soft shadows, pale light, and infinite horizons. For me your name contained all the delights of flesh and spirit, and I repeated it again and again, trying to kiss it with my lips. ~ Gustave Flaubert

And each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert. ~ Jerry Spinelli