"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"This is night, Diddykins. That's what we call it when it goes all dark like this. "
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

"You don't love a girl because of beauty. You love her because she sings a song only you can understand."
— L.J. Smith (Secret Vampire)

"I think nighttime is dark so you can imagine your fears with less distraction."
— Bill Watterson (The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes)

"Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn."
— Mahatma Gandhi

""Even when we're apart, we'll be looking at the same sky!""
— L.J. Smith (Daughters of Darkness)

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Ash? Get bent and die."
— L.J. Smith (Daughters of Darkness)

"I don't need to kill goats to say things. I CAN talk."
— L.J. Smith (Daughters of Darkness)

"Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it’s only faith that gives love its strength and its joy."
— Sergei Lukyanenko

""It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.
It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.
What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.
Now even that had flickered out.
How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.
Somebody did.
A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, "You alright?"
"Yes," I said.
"You've been standing here a long time," he said.
"I know," I said.
"You waiting for somebody?" he said.
"No," I said.
"Better move on, don't you think?" he said.
"Yes, sir," I said.
And I moved on."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"Softly, deftly, music shall caress you. Hear it, feel it, Secretly possess you."
— Andrew Lloyd Webber

"She wanted none of those days to end, and it was always with disappointment that she watched the darkness stride forward. "
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature and Selected Essays)

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."
— Vincent Van Gogh

"We sat in the car
& the night dropped
down until the
only sounds were
the crickets &
the dance of our voices

& for a moment
the world became
small enough to
roll back & forth
between us."
— Brian Andreas (Hearing Voices - Collected Stories & Drawings)

"Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright."
— Stephen King (Wolves of the Calla)

"I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!"
— Christopher Walken

"And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
and silently steal away."
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"What hath night to do with sleep?"
— John Milton

"The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?"
— John Fowles (The Magus)

"You can't throw a porcupine in a barn, set it on fire, and then expect to get licorice."
— Dana Carvey

"By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul."
— Carl Sandburg

"Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark"
— Isaac Bashevis Singer (Teibele and her demon)

"The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"We love the night and its quiet; and there is no night that we love so well as that on which the moon is coffined in clouds."
— Fitz-James O'Brien (Classic Ghost Stories)

"We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence."
— Charlotte Brontë

""Inheritor of a Dying World, we call thee to the Living Beauty. Wanderer in the Wild Darkness, we call thee to the Gentle Light. Long hast thou dwelt in Darkness---Quit the Night and seek the Day.""
— Neophyte Ritual of the Golden Dawn

"Yet just as the day has two halves, one governed by the sun and the other by the moon, so there are many who are people of the day and who busy themselves with daytime deeds, whilst others are children of the night, their minds consumed with nocturnal notions; but yet there are some in whom the two merge like the rising of the sun and the moon in a day."
— Aino Kallas

"The world is a giant eye, staring back at the stars. When it tires, it closes its lids--just as I am doing now--and gives way to dreams, which is why the night is so much more mysterious than the day."
— Sean Stewart (Clouds End)

"May night continue to fall upon the orchestra"
— André Breton

"It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores and night owls ... three or four floaters, solitaries, and drunks between benders lean against the sparkly resin counter, sucking the tea from their shtekelehs and working the calulations of their next big mistake."
— Michael Chabon

"Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel."
— Samuel Johnson

"The habit is now confirmed in me of spending the greater part of the day in sleep, while by night I wander far and wide through the city under the sedative influence of a tincture which has become necessary to my life"
— Matthew Phipps Shiel (Xelucha and Others)

"Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror."
— Guy de Maupassant (The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant)

"Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to."
— N. Scott Momaday (House Made of Dawn)

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no food reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that fins all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
"It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver"
— Gustave Flaubert (November)