The Midnight Mayor Quotes

Whoever had said in the guidebooks that the bum bag was a sensible device against theft had lied; no single item of dressware ever invented cried out "mug me" more than a pouch of zip-up plastic suspended by your groin. ~ Kate Griffin

There was almost a flicker of humanity in the man. The kind of human who pulled wings off flies as a kid, but still human. ~ Kate Griffin

Men don't ask other men if they're getting home OK, they just assume that beneath the frail, weak exterior lurks a muscle-building kung fu master fearless of ever being mugged. ~ Kate Griffin

I was the apprentice of Robert James Bakker. I'm sure you've heard of him. I am a sorcerer. I was there when Bakker died. We ... made it happen. I too have met death, and did not have to peel the bones away from my chest to survive the encounter. I am also, and incidentally, the Midnight Mayor, the blue electric angels, the fire in the wire, the song in the telephones, and we are having a bad week. Be smart; fear us. ~ Kate Griffin

When last I checked, you were a sorcerer, not a Jedi."
"You've seen Star Wars?"
"Seen it and denounced it."
"You've denounced Star Wars?"
She looked me straight in the eye and said, "Hollywood should not glorify witches."
"I think you've missed the point ... "
"I also denounce Harry Potter."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"Because ... "
" ... because literature, especially children's literature, should not glorify witches."
"Oda, what do you do for fun?"
She thought about it, then said, without a jot of humor, "I denounce things. ~ Kate Griffin

I looked at Judith. "This sounds strange, but I don't suppose you saw three mad women with a cauldron of boiling tea pass by this way?"
"No," she replied. The polite voice of reasonable people scared of exciting the madman.
"Flash of light? Puff of smoke? Erm ... " I tried to find a polite way of describing the symptoms of spontaneous teleportation without using the dreaded "teleportation" word. I failed. I slumped back into the sand. What kind of mystic kept a spatial vortex at the bottom of their cauldrons of tea anyway? ~ Kate Griffin

The whole calamity would be in one of those police reports that D. B. Sinclair and his "concerned citizens" filed carefully under "T" for "Things" at the back of a locked filing cabinet in the vehicle-licensing centre a day before a bonfire got accidentally out of control. ~ Kate Griffin

Always be polite to possible murderers: that was the twenty-four-hour-shopping philosophy. ~ Kate Griffin

My name is Matthew Swift. I'm a sorcerer, the only one in the city who survived Robert Bakker's purge. I was killed by my teacher's shadow and my body dissolved into telephone static and all they had left to bury was a bit of blood. Then we came back, and I am we and we are me, and we are the blue electric angels, creatures of the phones and the wires, the gods made from the surplus life you miserable excuse for mortals pour into all things electric. I am the Midnight Mayor, the protector of the city, the guardian of the night, the keeper of the gates, the watcher on the walls. We turned back the death of cities, we were there when Lady Neon died, we drove the creature called Blackout into the shadows at the end of the alleys, we are light, we are life, we are fire and, would you believe it, the word that best describes our condition right now is cranky.
Would you like to see what happens when you make us mad? ~ Kate Griffin

Startled, I accidently knock over my inkwell. A black tsunami of ink sprawls out across the page, engulfing the tiny village of my words. They are swept away into the midnight sea. Gone forever. I am bereft. ~ Danger Slater

At midnight the would-be ascetic announced: "This is the time to give up my home and seek for God. Ah, who has held me so long in delusion here?" God whispered, "I," but the ears of the man were stopped. With a baby asleep at her breast lay his wife, peacefully sleeping on one side of the bed. The man said, "Who are ye that have fooled me so long?" The voice said again, "They are God," but he heard it not. The baby cried out in its dream, nestling close to its mother. God commanded, "Stop, fool, leave not thy home," but still he heard not. God sighed and complained, "Why does my servant wander to seek me, forsaking me? ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Earth," Alexa finally said. "It's not that great anyway." And they all smiled sadly. Because, of course, it was everything. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

They had been married for three days.
Lauren stirred, moving closer to him for warmth. Careful not to disturb her, he drew the satin quilt up around her shoulders. Reverently he touched her cheek, tracing its elegant curve. Lauren had brought joy to his life and laughter to his home.She thought he was beautiful. When she looked at him, he felt beautiful.
Somewhere in another part of the big house a clock began chiming the hour of midnight. Lauren's lashes slowly flickered open, and he looked into her enchanting blue eyes. "It's Christmas," he whispered.
His wife smiled up at him, and her answer made his throat tighten. "No," she said softly, laying her fingers against his jaw. "Christmas came three days ago. ~ Judith McNaught

I would much rather have a life filled with magic than one filled with the mundane. ~ Debbie Viguie

I'm impressed you got up here so quickly - and without a pack of court ladies hounding after you. Perhaps you should try your hand at being an assassin." He shook the hair out of his face.
"I'm not interested in court ladies," he said thickly, and kissed her. ~ Sarah J. Maas

I love it all. I don't want to go through my career with one hand tied behind my back. I love making kids happy. I love the midnight audience. I like intense dramas. And I like high-adrenaline action films. ~ Nicolas Cage

What if we are being held in midnight, AK? Both of us locked in the dark of our pasts. Together. And maybe we must endure the darkness for a while."
I swallowed, eyes fixed on hers.
"But then, one day will come the sunrise. The darkness will need, and the sunlight will pour in. Sunrise, AK. Just imagine." She smiled and nearly broke my fucking heart. "We can chase the sunrise together. We can be the sunrise…together."
"Yeah" I said, unable to get the word 'sunrise' from my head. I wanted that. I wanted the fucking sunrise. I wanted the sunrise with Red. ~ Tillie Cole

The women in the play were really men, of course. The clock had just struck midnight and Cinderella was lamenting
'Goodness me, the clock has struck- Alackaday, and fuck my luck. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Yes - at the cost of a third of your army. What will happen when you try to seize what remains of Tamoura? When the Beldish strike at you again? Queen Maeve is watching you, I'm sure." He takes a deep breath. "Adelina, you're Queen of the Sealands now. You've annexed Domacca and northern Tamoura in the Sunlands. At some point, your goal should be not to conquer more territories but to keep order in the territories you do have. And you won't achieve that by ordering your Inquisitors to drag unmarked civilians out into the streets and brand them with a hot iron. ~ Marie Lu

Jesus, you're a wet blanket." Pigpen walks up behind Eli and grins like he just escaped prison. "Why are you giving the girl hell for wanting to go to an army bar at midnight? It's not like she told you she was going to kick puppies."
Pigpen winks at me. "You ready to roll? Or should I say hop? ~ Katie McGarry

The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone. ~ Sappho

As midnight came, he named every star in the sky after her. ~ Frauke Heyde

Pranayama. Stopping the right nostril with the thumb, through the left nostril fill in air, according to capacity; then, without any interval, throw the air out through the right nostril, closing the left one. Again inhaling through the right nostril eject through the left, according to capacity; practicing this three or five times at four hours of the day, before dawn, during midday, in the evening, and at midnight, in fifteen days or a month purity of the nerves is attained; then begins Pranayama. ~ Swami Vivekananda

I asked the boy who wept what it felt like, crystal meth, the prettiest name for a drug besides heroin. Crystal methamphetamine. His head fell back. He closed his eyes, then opened them. 'Come on, you know . . . you're just high as fuck.' Then in a dramatic whisper: 'Everything goes silent like a midnight of the mind. ~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

By the age I was then I ought to know the truism that things always look different in the morning. As the night comes on and the deeper it gets, the more mad we are, the more prone to dreadful fears and fantasies. In the morning, not when we first wake up but gradually, things begin to look unlike what they looked like at eleven, at midnight. ~ Barbara Vine

To observe is not to not feel - in fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. 'I have two homes,' my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, 'and I have no home.' To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why? ~ Rachel Cusk

Setting out around midnight, I couldn't help shaking my head, "We're the goddamned hottest vampire hunters ever." I muttered. ~ Richelle Mead

I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful of the animals that we are, an animal who bows to the incomparable power of natural forces when standing on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, an animal who understands a sense of humility when watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs in the lodgepole pines of the northern Rockies, an animal who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes above the Bosque del Apache in November, an animal who is not afraid to cry with delight in the middle of a midnight swim in a phospherescent tide, an animal who has not forgotten what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the source of all true visions.

As we step over the threshold of the twenty-first century, let us acknowledge that the preservation of wilderness is not so much a political process as a spiritual one, that the language of law and science used so successfully to define and defend what wilderness has been in the past century must now be fully joined with the language of the heart to illuminate what these lands mean to the future. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

(visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty shapes - the presence of something unknown and pitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the utterly miserable - the unloving and the unloved - there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death - the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain. ("The Lifted Veil") ~ George Eliot

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Our heads, the little globes which hold the midnight sky and the shining, invisible universes of thought, have been taken about as much for granted as the growth of a yellow pumpkin in the fall. ~ Loren Eiseley

About you

At noon
when the sun is highest in the sky
and the world is awash in light
I tell the world I'm over you.

At midnight
when the moon is highest in the sky
and the world is cloaked in darkness
my heart tells me all about you. ~ Pyrokardia

Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Okay, Shane," Agnes said as Brenda's clock gonged midnight. "I got Joey in the kitchen, a cop in the front hall, a dead body in the basement, and you in my bedroom. Where do you want to start? ~ Jennifer Crusie

The perfect Librarian is calm, cool, collected, intelligent, multilingual, a crack shot, a martial artist, an Olympic-level runner (at both the sprint and marathon), a good swimmer, an expert thief, and a genius con artist. They can steal a dozen books from a top-security strongbox in the morning, discuss literature all afternoon, have dinner with the cream of society in the evening, and then stay up until midnight dancing, before stealing some more interesting tomes at three a.m. That's what a perfect Librarian would do. In practice, most Librarians would rather spend their time reading a good book. ~ Genevieve Cogman

MURRY: Why do we even celebrate the New Year? It's just this arbitrary quirk of how we measure time in years, right? Midnight tonight is the very same transition from day to day that we do every 24 hours. But this thing in my hands, it feels real in a way the numbered calendar box never does. Why? What makes midnight tonight any different? ~ Hillary DePiano

The church may go through her dark ages, but Christ is with her in the midnight; she may pass through her fiery furnace, but Christ is in the midst of the flame with her. ~ Charles Spurgeon

You are so full of light," I say after a moment. "You align with joy, and I with fear and fury. If you could see into my thoughts, you would surely turn away. So why would you stay with me, even if return to Kenettra and resume our lives?"

"You paint me as a saint," he murmurs. "But I aligned with greed solely to prevent that."

Even now, he can make my lips twitch with a smile. "I'm serious, Magiano."

"As am I. None of us are saints. I have seen your darkness, yes, and know your struggle. I won't deny it." He touches my chin with one hand. At this gesture, the whispers seem to settle, pushed away where I can't hear them. "But you are also passionate and ambitious and loyal. You are a thousand things, mi Adelinetta, not just one. Do not reduce yourself to that. ~ Marie Lu

Not now. On this night so divine, Mariah did no pleading. The only thing on her heart was gratitude.

But she did have one request.

She wanted to stay awake, wanted to see what freedom looked like, felt like at midnight, then at the cusp of dawn. ~ Tonya Bolden

The hot humid day had followed the sun westward, leaving a cool midnight breeze. The sky, God's special gift to the sailor, was free of city lights and urban pollution. Placed on display, all of creation was set on the night's canopy of blue-black velvet adorned with the glistening diamond dust of billions of lesser stars and the sparkling one-point diamonds of the major stars.

A deep golden harvest moon hung low on the eastern horizon. Its glow cut a pewter path from moon to ship across shifting liquid swells rolling forward to meet the Farnley's bow. The bow, rocking gently, rose, then floated gently down to embrace the next swell. ~ Larry Laswell

Ode to Psyche - Excerpt

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: ~ John Keats