Bad Nights Quotes & Sayings

As if the daytime wasn't bad enough, I dream about him. Every night for three nights in a row. I can't get out of that moment when I was in his head, feeling what he felt, hearing his thoughts as he kissed me. I can feel him loving me. And it kills me, that moment when I feel his love shift into fear — Cynthia Hand

When our personal world is dark, we seek to fix the blame on any one of a number of factors - heredity, parents, destiny, what is known as bad luck or the bad break, and occasionally even on God.

It takes a long while to learn that sometimes we, ourselves, put out or, at least cloud over, our own sun, and that all things balance in the end. In nights of darkness we forget the shining days, though everyone experiences both. — Faith Baldwin

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. — H.L. Mencken

I really enjoy being with the people I play with. I enjoy their company. I love the crew, the band - we just move through the country like an army. I always feel very grateful to be up there. There aren't any bad nights anymore unless I'm singing bad, but then the band will carry me. And if they're playing bad, I will carry them.. — Bob Seger

I don't know if I can ever live up to the legacy that he left behind. I don't know if I want to. But Liz, he died. And you're still alive. And there is so much left of your life to live. I want to live it with you. I want to be a part of everything that remains for you, good and bad. I want to be there for your kids, for your stressful days, for your amazing days, for all of your nights and for every moment in between. We tried the time apart, but we are better together. Both of us. Yes, Grady was your great love, but you are mine. And if you would let me, I would be yours too. There isn't a limit on how much we can love, Liz. You had Grady. Now have me. — Rachel Higginson

You will lose touch with people you thought you wouldn't, watch from a distance while these people get married, gain weight, lose weight, move across the country, and get new sets of friends you will never meet. But you will look at your pictures of them and remember the nights you drank too much rum with them and you will enjoy those moments immensely. You will know what it is like to experience true nostalgia - the feelings a Hot Pocket can elicit will be astounding. It will not be a bittersweet kind of thing, because you know that it's not as much growing apart as it is growing up.
There will be successes, and failures, and a lot of good and bad things. You will watch yourself and the people you choose to be with fall in love and get married, get jobs, get fired, get a terrible tattoo, have babies, get sick, get better, get worse, lose parents, grow older, grow smarter. Things will flash forward, pass before your eyes like the lights at a terrible nightclub. — Alida Nugent

Ivanov: I am a bad, pathetic and worthless individual. One needs to be pathetic, too, worn out and drained by drink, like Pasha, to be still fond of me and to respect me. My God, how I despise myself! I so deeply loathe my voice, my walk, my hands, these clothes, my thoughts. Well, isn't that funny, isn't that shocking? Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, I was cheerful, tireless, passionate, I worked with these very hands, I could speak to move even Philistines to tears, I could cry when I saw grief, I became indignant when I encountered evil. I knew inspiration, I knew the charm and poetry of quiet nights when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or indulge you mind with dreams. I believed, I looked into the future as into the eyes of my own mother ... And now, my God, I am exhausted, I do not believe, I spend my days and nights in idleness. — Anton Chekhov

For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life. Decent folks must be allowed to sleep easy o' nights, mustn't they? Really it would be in shockingly bad taste to linger on such details, that's common knowledge. But personally I've never been able to sleep well since then. The bad taste remained in my mouth and I've kept lingering on the details, brooding over them. — Albert Camus

I love Saturday nights with my best friend and a big bowl of pasta, wanting a good scare, something that will say, 'Listen, your life is not as bad as this. Your life can be so much worse.' — Vera Farmiga

I don't have 30 days and 30 nights, to show you why all the hoochies say there's nothing finer than Scott Steiner, but all I need is one night to have your wife call me for the rest of her life, the big bad booty daddy, so this goes to all my freaks out there, Big Poppa Pump is your hook up, hollar if you hear me. — Scott Steiner

If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don't wait for time. — Ernst Fischer

Something maternal awakened, perhaps, by the physical contact with such lovely young babies? And tonight was a good night, thus I feel correspondingly tender. There will be other bad nights, but remembering the versatile quicksilver shifting of children's moods, I smile with equanimity and do not cherish grudges, as most of us adults do, letting them fester like a cancer. But I let my emotions run on the same forgiving and transient track. — Sylvia Plath

Among other things, I've taken up smoking. Ana says I should stop with the good girl/bad girl stuff, and obviously she's right, but sometimes when I have a cigarette in my hand and the streets are dangerously empty and I've had a few drinks after my shift and I am noticing the lights that are on in different apartments, lighting stairways and whole buildings, blinking red on the skyline, I think about the nights on the island when I was content to stand alone outside the house, listening to the god horns in that soft blackness, and tasting the air, sweet with salt. — Aoibheann Sweeney

It is too late for me to learn your wisdom in this matter. From the time I knew aught, I have lived with a knight and his lady whose love lit and warmed the dark hall on winter's nights. Madam, my example comes not from any book of romance. My grandparents walked and breathed; they kissed and quarreled. This I must have, and I will seek it with the point of my knife in a bad husband's heart if I can find it no other way. — Roberta Gellis

My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump lips. I can remember this is not how they were; I knew them, I knew them! Only six years have passed and yet I mythologize them as if it is six thousand. I am not culpable. Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown. — Aliya Whiteley

I want to remember it all, the good times and the bad times, the late nights, the boozing, the dancing into dawns, and all the great and not-so-great people I met and loved in those years ... — Ava Gardner

Each in the most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few, the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth. — Pablo Neruda

I think I'd better take some of Gramps' sleeping pills, I'm never going to be able to sleep without them. In fact I think I'd better take a supply of them. He's got plenty, and I'm sure I'll have a few bad nights at home before I get straightened out. Oh, I hope it's just a few. — Beatrice Sparks

It's tough being a dictator, but I've always thought it must be tougher being a hanger-on to a dictator. The late nights spent listening to his crazed ranting, the weary rictus grin from smiling at bad jokes, the draining knowledge that one misjudged comment could land you on the chopping block. — John Niven

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
(writing about US President Warren G. Harding) — H.L. Mencken

If, during any one of a million previous nights, a giant asteroid had smashed the Earth into gravel while we all slept, would it have mattered? With no one left to mourn the wreckage, one could even argue that it wouldn't be a bad way to end things at all: egalitarian if nothing else. I even thought of a scene in Star Wars where Princess Leia receives news that her home world has been destroyed by Darth Vader's Death Star. She throws a hairy fit, but two scenes later, she's back to flirting with Han Solo. — Adrian Barnes

If time were a bolt of cloth," said Om, "I would cut out all the bad parts. Snip out the scary nights and stitch together the good parts, to make time bearable. Then I could wear it like a coat, always live happily. — Rohinton Mistry

The bad news is, your choices and intentions, some people and places, those nights spent awake and all you've done, can lead you to the bottom of the pit. The good news is, this wouldn't be the first time someone's crawled, tooth and nail, out of hell. — Pleasefindthis

That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights. — Fran Lebowitz

On bad nights he would lose control altogether and break down, sobbing into his pillow. Yet he knew that if she returned to him both of them would suffer again. — Bao Ninh

But all over-expression, whether by journalists, poets, novelists, or clergymen, is bad for the language, bad for the mind; and by over-expression, I mean the use of words running beyond the sincere feeling of writer or speaker or beyond what the event will sanely carry. From time to time a crusade is preached against it from the text: 'The cat was on the mat.' Some Victorian scribe, we must suppose, once wrote: 'Stretching herself with feline grace and emitting those sounds immemorially connected with satisfaction, Grimalkin lay on a rug whose richly variegated pattern spoke eloquently of the Orient and all the wonders of the Arabian Nights.' And an exasperated reader annotated the margin with the shorter version of the absorbing event. How the late Georgian scribe will express the occurrence we do not yet know. Thus, perhaps: 'What there is of cat is cat is what of cat there lying cat is what on what of mat laying cat.' The reader will probably the margin with 'Some cat! — John Galsworthy

This was the history of the world. Recovery and collapse, despair and relief. The dialectic of clean and dirty. Every time is worse than the time before. The bad things come, days and nights and days and nights get so unbelievably fucked up, unbelievably fast, but in the end
if there is an end
everybody's best self just slogs forward, one stagger, one fall, one day, one 'what the fuck just happened?' moment of oblivion and soul-broken joy at a time. All we have to do is not die. — Jerry Stahl

I spent the nights before the Jets' two biggest games last year-for the AFL championship and the Super Bowl-with girls. But I don't consider that bad or foolish of me ... The night before a game, I prepare myself both mentally and physically for the next day. I think a ballplayer has to be relaxed to play well; and if that involves being with a girl that night, he should do it. — Joe Namath

William Kowalski is the kind of storyteller you don't see quite enough these days. The yarn spinner with a generous soul. The Hundred Hearts is a moving, humane adventure about the price of personal connections and the costs of sacrifice. I tore through this bad boy in two short nights. — Victor LaValle

I used to pray you know, pray to God that He would somehow stop it. All the nights of listening to my mother scream and things breaking. Of holding my brother and sister and listening to them cry and begging me to stop it.'
My voice is slow and steady like a freight train at night.
'I was too young, and we were always told that they'd put us in foster homes where people would rape us if we ever said anything. So we explained away the bruises and my mom wore big sunglasses whenever she left the house. And we invented car accidents if the bruising was too bad to cover with make-up. — Emily Andrews

I'd been awake for thirty-six hours and driving for ten. Restless weeks, sleepless nights, and the decision stole into me like a thief. I never planned to go back to North Carolina- I'd buried it- but I blinked and found my hands on the wheel, Manhattan a sinking island to the north. I wore a week-old beard and three day denim, felt stretched by an edginess that bordered on pain, but no one here would fail to recognize me. That's what home was all about, for good or bad. — John Hart

Turkish Delight
Turkish delight has had a bad reputation since that man C.S.Lewis - a positive genius in other ways - linked it for ever with one of the most terrifying creations in literature, the White Witch of Narnia, and that naughty, sticky, traitorous Edmund. But with the sensuous pleasure imbued in its melting, gelatinous texture, and, when made in the proper way, delicately perfumed with rose petals, flavoured with oils and dusted with sugar, it reclaims its power as a sweet as seductive as Arabian nights. The fact that it now carries with it a whiff of danger merely adds to its pleasure. It is not, truly, a sweet for children. They simply complain, and get the almonds stuck up their noses, — Jenny Colgan

Reading is a tool no one can take away. A million bad things may happen in life and it'll still be with you, like a flashlight that never needs a battary. Reading can offer a crack of light on the blackest of nights. — Blue Balliett

Yeah and it's over before you know it
It all goes by so fast
Yeah the bad nights take forever
And the good nights don't ever seem to last — Tom Petty

The second simultaneous thing Reacher was doing was playing around with a little mental arithmetic. He was multiplying big numbers in his head. He was thirty-seven years and eight months old, just about to the day. Thirty-seven multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five was thirteen thousand five hundred and five. Plus twelve days for twelve leap years was thirteen thousand five hundred and seventeen. Eight months counting from his birthday in October forward to this date in June was two hundred and forty-three days. Total of thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty days since he was born. Thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty days, thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty nights. He was trying to place this particular night somewhere on that endless scale. In terms of how bad it was. Truth was, it wasn't the best night he had ever passed, but it was a long way from being the worst. A very long way. — Lee Child

It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321. — Anthony Burgess

Better. Some nights it's hard to sleep. So I take a pain pill. I hate them." "You'd make a bad drug addict." "Maybe not. I really liked pot. I really did. — Anonymous

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything. — Robert Cormier

Consummation Of Grief

I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead. — Charles Bukowski

What ever happened to happy endings?
They got them on shows at Saturday matinees.
Sure, but what about life?
All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That's a happy ending once a day. Next morning I'm up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I'm going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay. — Ray Bradbury

The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go withotu altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews. — Werner Herzog

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. — Virginia Woolf

When I said I've always wanted you, I meant all of you: your body, your ideas, your memories, your whole heart. I want your dreams, your spare drawer, your mornings, your worries. Your triumphs, your laughter, your bad nights and your quiet days. I want your future, Ren.... just so we're clear." Cole — A.J. DeWall

He's not his immaculate self today. He's a little rough around the edges, probably from a few bad nights' sleep. His mustard shirt is the ugliest colour I have ever seen. His tie is badly knotted, his jaw is shadowed with stubble. His hair is a mess and has a devil's horn on one side. He's practically a Gamin today. He looks divine and he's looking at me with a memory in his eyes. — Sally Thorne

It was weird because I was pregnant, throughout that so it was weird being a pregnant witch. I was in a really bad mood but luckily, because I sleep with the director, he just sort of scheduled me so I only had to do it two nights. — Helena Bonham Carter

I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights. — Raymond Chandler

But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep. — Margaret Atwood

Raise your hand if you've spent nights crying yourself to sleep, raise your hand if you've felt as if you'd rather hide in bed all day than face the people that make you feel small or powerless! Raise your hand if you've felt as if you'd rather lie to people than tell them the truth about who you really are, because at least you wouldn't be the victim of hateful behavior or prejudice! And raise your hand if lying feels almost as bad. — Dianna Agron

Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred. — Don DeLillo

The bad nights made the good ones impossible to enjoy; the good nights made the bad ones worse. — R. Lee Smith

It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion. — Yann Martel

People say, 'Jay, you're a great guy, you just had a couple of bad nights.' People that have themselves under control don't have a couple of bad nights like that. Plain and simple. — Jayson Williams

That was one of the most rewarding things about spending nights in the open. Birds were bound to wake you up, and whether they carried good or bad luck, at least they woke you up with music. — Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can't explain without handing over a full map of one's life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand for long days and nights when things were bad or good, or when things were too small to be described at all: when things just were. This is a life. — Colm Toibin

It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster ... I think I somehow felt that as long as I was conscious, nothing bad could happen ... — Azar Nafisi

Bad nights lead to better days — Ryan Adams

All bad nights come to an end. — Samantha Schutz

Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching about a bad one. Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness. — Julian Barnes

She had had insomnia badly when she was fresh from Home ... She had had only occasional bad nights since then. Bad? she thought. Why bad? I rarely feel much the worse the next day, except for a sort of moral irritability that seems to go with the feeling that I ought to have spent all those silent hours asleep. — Robin McKinley