The Dark Tide Quotes

People claimed witches were nightmares, dreams, but Eva felt they were closer to plants; wild magic grew inside of each of them, waiting to be harvested in the strands of their hair, their salt tears, their spit and blood. ~ Alicia Jasinska

To show mercy is not naïve. To hold out against the end of hope is not stupidity or madness. It is fundamentally human. Of course... We are all doomed; we are all poisoned from our birth by the rot of stars. That does not mean we should succumb...to the seductive fallacy of despair, the dark tide that would drown us. You may think I'm stupid, you may call me a madman and a fool, but at least I stand upright in a fallen world. ~ Rick Yancey

I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it's too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one's being while the dark tide rises. Then comes the moon, marvellously serene, and small stars, very merry for some reason of their own. It is so easy to forget, in a worldly life, to attend to these miracles. ~ Katherine Mansfield

The Witch Queen comes on wings of night.
The Witch Queen has your heart's delight.
Hold him, hold him, hold on tight.
Hide him, hide him, out of sight. ~ Alicia Jasinska

She has the same features as every other Syrena. Smooth olive skin, dark black hair, violet eyes. But hers are all arranged in just the right way to make her stunning. ~ Anna Banks

Jerusalem (1804)
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green
And was the holy lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills
Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spears o'clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
'Til we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land ~ William Blake

The light can only shine in the darkness. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Young she was and yet not so. The braids of her dark hair were touched by no frost; her white arms and clear face were flawless and smooth, and the light of stars was in her bright eyes, grey as a cloudless night; yet queenly she looked, and thought and knowledge were in her glance, as of one who has known many things that the years bring. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The only place the broken past has in our present, is the place we give it. ~ Lucian Bane

How do we recognise another person? At its most basic, by shape, by colour, by outline, by dark and light, by smell. Or by nuances of tone, by the way the face looks in repose, the cadences of the voice, full of small interior knowledge, the way they hold their mouth while listening, or the way their gaze holds yours. By what their eyes say when they are not speaking. ~ Marion Coutts

There were no romantic ships passing in the night. It was more like dinghies in the dark: Awkward, slow and hard to handle, quickly capsizing without ever finding land. ~ Candace Vianna

Moths and butterflies are not the same thing. Moths sneak around in the dark munching your sweater and are ugly. Butterflies hand out with flowers in the daytime and are pretty. Never mind any facts or what silkworm moths are responsible for, or what poisonous butterflies do. ~ Robert Fulghum

I have felt something in the garden I discovered. I have felt the presence of something other. And now, standing in the dark, with a salt wind blowing up from the invisible sea, from the remembered beloved river ... ~ Helen Humphreys

With rushing winds and gloomy skies The dark and stubborn Winter dies: Far-off, unseen, Spring faintly cries, Bidding her earliest child arise; March! ~ Bayard Taylor

To forget easily is not a gift I am blessed with, The winters and those valentines, I did my loving all the time, But now the difference, She sits in heaven with saint valentine, ~ Piyush Rohankar

Time and ka and trains. I'm thinking about them and many other things.
(Lady of Shadows: Dark Tower, The Drawing of the Three) ~ Stephen King

I drove out. There were a half-dozen cars there. A house man let me in. Brell came hurrying to me to pump my hand. He was a trim-bodied man in his late forties, dark and handsome in a slightly vulpine way, and I suspected he wore a very expensive and inconspicuous hair piece. He looked the type to go bald early. He had a resonant voice and a slightly theatrical presence. He wore tailored twill ranch pants and a crisp white shirt with blue piping. ~ John D. MacDonald

Ryder! What's taking you so long?"
"I'm on my way!" he yells back.
It feels like forever before he pushes open the door and ducks inside. Then I see why it took him so long. He's somehow got the three cats tucked under one arm and the cake plate clutched in the other hand. No spare for a flashlight or lantern--so he accomplished this all in the dark.
"Here," he says, handing off the cake to me before releasing Kirk, Spock, and Sulu into the crate and latching the door.
"Seriously, Ryder? You brought the cake?"
He shrugs. "I was hungry."
Hmm, I guess all that kissing worked up his appetite. For cake. I'm not sure if I should be offended or not. On the plus side, he doesn't look like he's about to puke. So we're making progress as far as his fear of storms goes. I guess that's something.
"Did you happen to bring a fork?" I ask, setting the plate on the makeshift tabletop.
He produces two from his pocket, holding them up triumphantly. So we eat cake while the sirens blare. Actually, it doesn't sound that bad out there. Still, the fact that we're so calm--that Ryder's so calm--should tell you how routine this is getting. As long as we don't hear that awful freight-train sound, we're good.
"What happened to the cake?" he asks between bites. "It looks like someone mutilated it while I was gone."
"Sorry," I mutter. "Guess I did some stress bingeing. You realize you're not wearing a shirt, right?"
He glances down and shrugs, his ~ Kristi Cook

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

Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted - never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. ~ Wilkie Collins

I would like to sing someone to sleep,
to sit beside someone and be there.
I would like to rock you and sing softly
and go with you to and from sleep.
I would like to be the one in the house
who knew: The night was cold.
And I would like to listen in and listen out
into you, into the world, into the woods.
The clocks shout to one another striking,
and one sees to the bottom of time.
And down below one last, strange man walks by
and rouses a strange dog.
And after that comes silence.
I have laid my eyes upon you wide;
and they hold you gently and let you go
when something stirs in the dark. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Clouds overlaid the sky as with a shroud of mist, and everything looked sad, rainy, and threatening under a fine drizzle which was beating against the window-panes, and streaking their dull, dark surfaces with runlets of cold, dirty moisture. Only a scanty modicum of daylight entered to war with the trembling rays of the ikon lamp. The dying man threw me a wistful look, and nodded. The next moment he had passed away. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He knew the law of such things: people in brightly lit places cannot see into the dark. ~ Marie Rutkoski

I take off my shirt, I show you.
I shaved the hair out under my arms.
I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair
on my legs with a knife, getting white.

My hair is the color of chopped maples.
My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south.
(Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills)

Skin polished as a Ming bowl
showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds
of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet.

In the night I come to you and it seems a shame
to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man.

You recognize strangers,
think you lived through destruction.
You can't explain this night, my face, your memory.

You want to know what I know?
Your own hands are lying. ~ Carolyn Forche

When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past. ~ Jackie Kay

Fire burns brighter in the dark. ~ Suzanne Collins

I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real. ~ Sarah Dessen

Why did you enter Gobhann?"
"I already told you."
"I know what you told me", she said impatiently. "I want to know the real reason."
He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then reached for her plate. He set it down on the floor with his, then pulled her close and put his mouth against her ear.
"I went inside Gobhann because I wanted you to come out of the dark. With me. Because I love you. Because you were made for more than life in that dreadful place." He sat back. "There. All the reasons."
"But the price you paid
"
"Was worth it," he finished without hesitation. "You, Morgan of Melksham, were worth that price." He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Don't you think? ~ Lynn Kurland

You Have to Be Very Careful"

You have to be careful telling things.
Some ears are tunnels.
Your words will go in and get lost in the dark.
Some ears are flat pans like the miners used
looking for gold.
What you say will be washed out with the stones.

You look for a long time till you find the right ears.
Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to,
a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles,
and the slow, gradually growing possibility
that when you find such ears
they already know. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I ~ Doris Lessing

Truth is like a flower, if you tend to it and leave it in the sunshine, it will blossom into something beautiful for all to see. If you hide it in the dark and neglect it, it will wither and die ~ Angie Karan

When the dark clouds flutter like bats in my head I wish I could open a window and release them. ~ Frank McCourt

They are dark angels . . . Intelligent and cunning and manipulative. They bear the knowledge of thousands of years of life. Like angels, they have the face of the divine, but they turned away from it. Thy have chosen darkness, and that choice reverberated through eternity. ~ Cassandra Clare

Be a part of the world, but never in it. Because of what we do, we have to interact with people. But we must be unseen shadows who move among them. Never let anyone know you. Never give them a chance to realize you don't age. Move through the darkness ever watchful, ever alert. We are all that stands between the humans and slavery. Without us, they all die and their souls are lost forever. Our responsibilities are great. Out battles numerous and legendary. But at the end of the night, you go home alone where no one knows what it is you have done to save the world that fears you. You can never bask in your glory. You can never know love or family. We are Dark-Hunters. We are forever powerful. We are forever alone. (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:

'Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.'

Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, 'What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?

'I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!

- "A Dream ~ William Blake

Kriya is an ancient science," Yogananda writes. Mahavatar Babaji rediscovered and clarified the technique after it had been lost in the Dark Ages. Babaji revealed to Lahiri Mahasaya: "The Kriya Yoga which I am giving to the world through you in this nineteenth century is a revival of the same science which Krishna gave, millenniums ago, to Arjuna, and which was later known to Patanjali, and to Christ, St. John, St. Paul, and other disciples. ~ Lahiri Mahasaya

It's like a feeling. Like that feeling you get when you've been away from home for far too long, and you're tired and hungry, and just fucking spent, and your car is low on gas and it's getting dark, and you're sick of cheap hotels and cheap diners and every song on the radio and every thought in your head, and all you want to do is crawl into your own bed and fall into a dead sleep . . . and then you turn the last corner, and there it is. Home. All your troubles melt away with one big sigh, and you hit the gas hard, because you just can't stay away one second longer. ~ J.T. Geissinger

Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant. ~ Robinson Jeffers

Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remember almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of aura, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get in bed at four in the afternoon with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up – I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Learn from stars; even in the dark they give off light, not despair. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler. Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in roll-call square for the time to leave for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless bodies, and everything is grey around us, and we are grey; in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy less. Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white, distant, and only warms the skin, but when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colourless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun. ~ Primo Levi

She's contemplative; I can feel the air around her thick with her thoughts. "No," she says at last, "I want to believe you're being sincere but I know you're not. So I say no, because even if I allow myself to fantasize a little about our lives in a cabin on the beach, I still find myself being left by you. There's almost no scenario I can think of where we live happily ever after."
"There could be," I tell her and mean it at the moment. Maybe mean it for longer. Her fingers stop moving and she sighs. I open my eyes and she's staring down at me. The lights have come on around the parking lot and one of them shines directly into her face. She angelic, a neon seraphim under the brilliant skies of the spring. I can see us on our boat, eating our hand picked clams on the fire behind our place. I can see it so vividly I'm almost sure it's happened. ~ Jaden Wilkes

You who will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Remember
When you speak of our failings
The dark time too
Which you have escaped ~ Bertolt Brecht

I couldn't help but feel as if everyone had lied about everything. We all had secrets. We all had a dark side to our innocent cover. I wondered what we would be like, if we had been completely honest with each other in the first place. Maybe more people would be alive, but then again, more people could be dead. ~ Shannon A. Thompson

The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go ~ Stephen King

Fantastic! Right in the middle of that long stretch between Christmas and Spring Break, your coats are getting dirty, everything's dark, dingy - what a great time for a movie! ~ John Hughes

He peered into the night-dark windows of the afflicted girls, whispering names and stirring fits into their dreams until their own screams awakened them. The girls concocted fantastic stories of witches and curses and torture at the hands of specters. More accusers joined their ranks without his nurturing, puppets of their own envy. Such imagination, such dedication to the destruction of their own. And all in his name. It touched his dark soul. ~ Susan Catalano

In a universe filled with billions of stars, the universe morns the death of each and every one and marks it with a dark hole that can never be replace; so where are you are and whomever you maybe, your place is unique and can never be replaced until the end of days, your value is for every true, however great or small it may seem... ~ Marcus L. Lukusa

Maybe the bottom of my own night is a darkness I cannot descend into without "the light that is within me" becoming dark. ~ Pat Schneider