Crying In The Night Quotes & Sayings

Sprang on your nerves with all the abruptness of a normal night's dream turning to nightmare. Dog into wolf, light into twilight, emptiness into waiting presence, here were your underage Marine barfing in the street, barmaid with a ship's propeller tattooed on each buttock, one potential berserk studying the best technique for jumping through a plate glass window (when to scream Geronimo? before or after the glass breaks?), a drunken deck ape crying back in the alley because last time the SP's caught him like this they put him in a strait jacket. — Anonymous

And so to my fool's bed. What was that? No, no, not a girl crying in the garden. No one, cold, hungry, and banished, was shivering there, longing and not daring to come in. It was the chains swinging at the well. It would be folly to get up and go out and call again: Psyche, Psyche, my only love. I am a great queen. I have killed a man. I am drunk like a man. All warriors drink deep after the battle. Bardia's lips on my hand were like the touch of lightning. All great princes have mistresses and lovers. There's the crying again. No, it's only the buckets at the well. "Shut the window, Poobi. To your bed, child. Do you love me, Poobi? Kiss me good night. Good night." The king's dead. He'll never pull my hair again. A straight thrust and then a cut in the leg. That would have killed him. I am the Queen; I'll kill Orual too. — C.S. Lewis

What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and to emptiness. Sometimes a voice of one drowning, and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful, the unhappiness of many people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. It is usually the central thing around which their lives are built, and I suppose if they did not live most of their lives in the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on. — Bertrand Russell

I hear pounding feet in the streets below
And the women crying and the children know
That there's something wrong
And it's hard to believe that love will prevail
Oh it won't rain all the time
The sky won't fall forever
And though the night seems long
Your tears won't fall forever — Jane Siberry

He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. Jesus Christ. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child's whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in the wings whenever the priest came to tear up his mother's grave. Lily cried in the twilight field where he picked wild poppies with Martha; Lily's was the cry he heard those nights the kiln burned, the levee broke, the ranch went to nothing. — Joan Didion

And as I fall to fuddled sleep I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it: "I heard Youth calling in the night: 'Gone is my former world-delight; For there is naught my feet may stay; The morn suffuses into day, It dare not stand a moment still But must the world with light fulfil. More evanescent than the rose My sudden rainbow comes and goes, Plunging bright ends across the sky - Yea, I am Youth because I die! — Jack London

Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one, in the night, when anxiety does not let me sleep, I only know this one. And what is devilish in it seems to me quite clear. It is the vanity and the craving for enjoyment, which is forever whirring around oneself or even around someone else ... and enjoying it. The wish that a naive person sometimes has: "I would like to die and watch others crying over me," is what such a writer constantly experiences: he dies (or he does not live) and continually cries over himself — Franz Kafka

That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 P.M. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, "I've got to go," and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn't hug you, and I didn't comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I got bullied in high school. A lot of girls were so mean to me because their boyfriends wanted to hang out with me and my girls, so they pretty much bullied me to the point where I was crying at night. — Nicole Polizzi

Life's gonna kick you in the butt.
That's what it does.
But if you gotta put up with this crap, the least you can expect is that your friends will stand by you. I mean, for crying in the night, what else are friends for but to help you make right what isn't in life? (Kira, The Mishmorat) — Richelle E. Goodrich

Now, hearing Tansi speak, Afua resumed her crying, but it was as though no one heard. These tears were a matter of routine. They came for all of the women. They dropped until the clay below them turned to mud. At night, Esi dreamed that if they all cried in unison, the mud would turn to river and they could be washed away into the Atlantic. — Yaa Gyasi

There was some people hurt far worst than I was in that hospital, let me tell you. Poor old boys with arms and legs and hands and who knows what else missing. Boys what had been shot in their stomach and chests and faces. At night the place sound like a torture chamber - them fellers be howling and crying and calling for their mamas. — Winston Groom

That night, though, Dick wakes up crying, but happy too, the bitter aftertaste of a happy ending in his mouth. — Stephen Graham Jones

The voice of grief is rather convincing, isn't it? It tells you you're "too old," "not good enough," or "not worthy enough" for another chance at life, that starting over is impossible. This voice in your head is the first thing you hear in the morning and the last thing you hear at night. It drives with you to work. It stays with you at lunch. Its message is so consistent that because of its repetitive power, you may be inclined to believe it. But, as persuasive as the voice of grief is, everything it says is a lie.
It's all a pack of lies.
Do you want the truth? If you do, then start listening to life calling to you inside your grief.
How? Every time you are yearning to be held and loved, to laugh again, listen to your yearning. Do not listen to your fear . . . Listen to life calling you, "I am here, come on over. Take a chance on me. I am your life, and you're all that I've got. — Christina Rasmussen

Soon it began to drizzle for the second time that night. The drops grew heavier and became visible in the headlights of the cars. It was said by some of the police on the scene that God was crying for the girl in the garden. To others, it was only rain. (final lines) — George Pelecanos

As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I walked along the shore in the morning light, the winds have slept in the arms of dawn after crying all night. — Ipsit Bibhudarshi

Let me tell you girls a story, short and sweet. In high school, I was a junior varsity cheerleader dating a senior who was up for football scholarships. I'd slept with him several times willingly. One night I wasn't in the mood, but he was. So he held me down and forced me. The few people I told about it - including my best friend - pointed out what would happen to him if I told. They stressed the fact that I hadn't been a virgin, that we were dating, that we'd had sex before. So I kept quiet. I never even told my mother. That boy put bruises on my body. I was crying and begging him to stop and he didn't. That's called rape, ladies. — Tammara Webber

That night I dreamed of Conrad. I was the same age I was now, but he was younger, ten or eleven maybe. I think he might even have been wearing
overalls. We played outside my house until it got dark, just running around the yard.
I said, "Susannah will be wondering where you are. You should go home." He said, "I can't. I don't know how.
Will you help me?" And then I was sad, because I didn't know how either. We weren't at my house anymore, and it was so dark. We were in the
woods. We were lost.
When I woke up, I was crying and Jeremiah was asleep next to me. I sat up in the bed. It was dark, the only light in the room was my alarm clock. It
read 4:57. I lay back down. — Jenny Han

Writing a book is like rearing children
willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love. — Annie Dillard

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it's as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away. — Nadine Gordimer

To some, the image of a pale body glimmering on a dark night whispers of defeat. What good is a God who does not control his Son's suffering? But another sound can be heard: the shout of a God crying out to human beings, "I LOVE YOU." Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to - because of us. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.
Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross. — Philip Yancey

If you were only one inch tall, you'd ride a worm to school.
The teardrop of a crying ant would be your swimming pool.
A crumb of cake would be a feast
And last you seven days at least,
A flea would be a frightening beast
If you were one inch tall.
If you were only one inch tall, you'd walk beneath the door,
And it would take about a month to get down to the store.
A bit of fluff would be your bed,
You'd swing upon a spider's thread,
And wear a thimble on your head
If you were one inch tall.
You'd surf across the kitchen sink upon a stick of gum.
You couldn't hug your mama, you'd just have to hug her thumb.
You'd run from people's feet in fright,
To move a pen would take all night,
(This poem took fourteen years to write
'Cause I'm just one inch tall). — Shel Silverstein

Solitude In the dark night Snowflakes falling slowly In absolute silence Blissful peace The joy of solitude Holding my book Sipping my tea Chocolate on my tongue My heart is filled with contentment Stroking silky fur beside me Looking into dark brown eyes That shine with devotion Pure unconditional love Immersing myself in a foreign world Living a life in hours Laughing, crying, loving In the dark night The joy of solitude — Helle Gade

When I go to the woods now, I always head out along the brook and go straight to the big maple. I run there, like Toby must have done on that stormy night, then I bend down and crawl on the earth. Because what if there's a clue? What if there's a piece of chunky strawberry bubble gum still bundled up in its waxy wrapper, or a weather-faded matchbook, or a fallen button from somebody's big gray coat? What if buried under all those leaves is me? Not this me, but the girl in a Gunne Sax dress with the back zipper open. The girl with the best boots in the world. What if she's under there? What if she's crying? Because she will be, if I find her. Her tears tell the story of what she knows. That the past, present, and future are just one thing. That there's nowhere to go from here. Home is home is home. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I will never be old, Rachel promised herself. I will never be sad. I'd scarf a cyanide capsule first, kill myself like that friend of Lotto's everyone is crying about. Life isn't worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of the year. Under the dying — Lauren Groff

Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to fine, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it's a public nightmare; if then strange beasts walk upside down like flies on the ceiling; crimson wings flap, the curtains fly; a sad man wearing a blue waistcoat with green buttons sits in the centre of the room, crying because he has swallowed the mirror and it hurts and he burps in flashes of glass and light; if crakes move and cry; the world is flipped, unrolled down in the vast marble stair; a stained threadbare carpet; the hollow silver dancing shoes, hunting-horns ... — Janet Frame

Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, Who? Who? — Thomas Pynchon

I once had a love who folded secrets between her thighs like napkins
and concealed memories in the valley of her breasts.
There was no match for the freckles on her chest,
and no one could mistake them for a field of honeysuckles.
Upon her lips, a thousand lies were spread in sweet gloss.
Her kiss was like a storybook from ancient history.
She was at home with the body of a man inside her, beside her.
At night, when she lay in bed crying,
no one could mistake the tears she wept for a summer shower
She is gone, my love. She was a wanderess, a wildflower. — Roman Payne

Oh, I don't wonder babies always cry when they wake up in the night. So often I want to do it too. — L.M. Montgomery

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

This is the best night of my life," Raffy says, crying.
"Raffy, half our House has burnt down," I say wearily. "We don't have a kitchen."
"Why do you always have to be so pessimistic?" she asks. "We can double up in our rooms and have a barbecue every night like the Cadets."
Silently I vow to keep Raffy around for the rest of my life. — Melina Marchetta

Only do not forget, if I wake up crying
it's only because in my dream I'm a lost child
hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands ... — Pablo Neruda

What doesn't work is when we adopt some TEMPORARY habits, lose some weight and then pick our previous habits back up. Surprise, surprise. The weight always returns. Live one way, lose weight. Live another way, gain weight. Hhhmmm...how curious.

What also doesn't work is lying to yourself about what you ate and then falling into a crying heap on the scale, playing the victim. Poor you. Never mind you ate three biscuits with butter before your dinner even hit the table at Billy Bob's Feed trough last night--it was only a salad. Never mind you gobbled down five handfuls of M&Ms off the receptionist's desk between trips to the break room for a soda--it was diet! Never mind you drove through Coffee Planet on the way to work and downed a 32 oz. Italian-named mocha-choca-ya-ya worth a day's calories in some starving nations--you skipped the whipped cream and said "no thanks" to the Chihuahua-sized muffin.

I'm telling you, diets work. — Shannon Sorrels

The Silk Worm
I stood before a silk worm one day.
And that night my heart said to me,
"I can do things like that, I can spin skies,
I can be woven into love that can bring warmth to people;
I can be soft against a crying face,
I can be wings that lift, and I can travel on my thousand feet
throughout the earth, my sacs filled with the sacred."
And I replied to my heart,
"Dear, can you really do all those things?"
And it just nodded "Yes" in silence.
So we began and will never cease. — Rumi

So long as men must toss in weary fancies all the dark night, crying, "Would God it were morning," to find, it may be, when it arrives, but little comfort in the grey dawn, so long must we regard God as one to be seen or believed in--cried unto at least--across all the dreary flats of distress or dark mountains of pain, and therefore those who would help their fellows must sometimes look for him, as it were, through the eyes of those who suffer, and try to help them to think, not from ours, but from their own point of vision. — George MacDonald

If I feel like crying, I'll just cry in a dream. Something I really try not to do in my waking hours. I like good melodrama because it's just an undumping of all these compulsions we feel that we work so hard to master during our waking hours. No wonder we crash to sleep in bed at night. We have to, otherwise we'd just spend our waking hours shredding the feelings from everybody else. — Guy Maddin

Tana would sit near the door to the basement with fingers in her ears, tears and snot running down her face as she cried and cried and cried. And little Pearl would toddle up, crying, too. They cried while they ate their cereal, cried while they watched cartoons, and cried themselves to sleep at night, huddled together in Tana's little bed. 'Make her stop' Pearl said, but Tana couldn't. — Holly Black

I feel like I'm in the middle of the ocean. Like I could swim in any direction but I can't see land on any side so I don't know which way to go. I feel like I just have to keep hooking up and see what sticks. I didn't know I'd be crying in the bathroom at work every day. The twentysomething years are a whole new way of thinking about time. There's this big chunk of time and a whole bunch of stuff needs to happen somehow. My sister is thirty-five and single. I'm terrified that's going to happen to me. I can't wait to be liberated from my twenties. I'd better not still be doing this at thirty. Last night I prayed for just one thing in my life to be certain. — Meg Jay

And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine's portion - to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night's rest in the course of the next three months. — Jane Austen

Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's there — Bob Dylan

His Malina was a mystery, a lovely and welcome mystery. He couldn't resist smoothing his palm over her silky hair. Stroking her like that, over and over again filled him with peace. Concerns about his mill and Steafan and all that Wilhelm might expect from him floated away on a cloud of contentment. Until he felt warm wetness on his skin where her face nestled. "Are ye weeping?" "No," she said, but her voice caught on a sob. "There," he said, "now we have both told a lie to the other. We are even." Whatever had her distraught, her heart wasn't so heavy that she couldn't give a small chuckle. "Maybe I'm crying just a little," she said. "It's fine, though. Don't worry. Get some sleep." "I canna. My da told me a good husband doesna lay his head down for the night if his household isna in order and his wife isna content." "He sounds like a very responsible man. Like father, like son." No one had given him as much to feel proud over as this woman. — Jessi Gage

Some time in the night I got up, tiptoed to my window, and looked out at my doghouse. It looked so lonely and empty sitting there in the moonlight. I could see that the door was slightly ajar. I thought of the many times I had lain in my bed and listened to the squeaking of the door as my dogs went in and out. I didn't know I was crying until I felt the tears roll down my cheeks. — Wilson Rawls

In the future, Martin will recall this night as the first time -- and one of the only times -- he ever saw Germans crying in public, not at the news of a dead loved one or at the sight of their bombed home, and not in physical pain, but from spontaneous emotion. For this brief time, they were not hiding from one another, wearing their masks of cold and practical detachment. The music stirred the hardened sediment of their memory, chafed against layers of horror and shame, and offered a rare solace in their shared anger, grief and guilt. — Jessica Shattuck

So we down-to-earth, gutsy, tough, realistic, and practical types have just been squandering billions of dollars and unimaginable amounts of energy, nerve-work, and materials in whizzing off to the moon to discover, as astronomers knew before, that it was just a dreary slag heap. This is the true, original and scientifically etymological meaning of being lunatics. Crying for the moon. — Alan Watts

As Laird of Badenoch, Will is a man of property and power. He needs an heir." She shook her head sadly. "I canna give him one."
"Ye've only been wed a few years. Give it time." A wistful smile lifted Margaret's lips, "Enjoy the making of a child. When all ye can hear in the night is one or another of your bairns crying, ye'll be wishing for the days when the only reason ye lost sleep was trying to give your man his heir. — Mia Marlowe

You can see girls getting too excited and they start crying or worse. In a lot of these countries they don't get a lot of gigs to go to, so when they get to see their favorite artist they take full advantage of it. Obviously the excitement builds up too much for some on the night and they get a bit ... crazy. — Niall Horan

At night we cry sometimes, and if you think that just applies to the females then you have never been in combat, because everyone cries sooner or later. Everyone cries. — Michael Grant

There is a moment when all hope disappears, all pride is gone, all expectation, all faith, all desire. I own that moment. It belongs to me. That's when I hear the sound, the sound of a mind breaking. It's not a loud crack like when bones shatter or a spine fractures or a skull collapses. And it's not something soft and wet like a heart breaking. It's a sound that makes you wonder how much pain a person can endure; a sound that shatters memories and lets the past leak into the present; a sound so high that only the hounds of hell can hear it. Can you hear it? Someone is curled up in a tiny ball crying softly into an endless night. — Michael Robotham

I have been speaking to you all of your life. In the gurgle of a tide pool, I breathed myself into you. I drew you down from the trees and I lifted you onto your feet. I freed your hands to become your tools so that you would cradle me in my old age, but you have turned on me. My strongest warrior for life, you have been transformed into an insatiable messenger of death. Only a few of my children are still listening when I howl to them, crying in the night, sending the oceans in great surges to cleanse my land -- to cleanse, and to warn you who no longer listen. I WILL BE HEARD. — Sarah Warden

There are few things, it may be feared, in which Christians come so far short of Christ's example, as they do in the matter of prayer. Our Master's strong crying and tears
His continuing all night in prayer to God
His frequent withdrawal to private places, to hold close communion with the Father, are things more talked of and admired than imitated. We live in an age of hurry, bustle, and so-called activity. Men are tempted continually to cut short their private devotions, and abridge their prayers. When this is the case, we need not wonder that the Church of Christ does little in proportion to its machinery. The Church must learn to copy its Head more closely. Its members must be more in their closets. "We have little," because little is asked. (James 4:2.) — J.C. Ryle

But nothing was said about chicken farming anymore. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he might catch her crying and pet her a bit. 'What's the matter, little baby? You got a fever? You want to take the night off?' She might murmur something about candling eggs, but he wouldn't be able to understand what she meant. And after a while she cried on without knowing what she meant either, as a girl cries over a bad dream long after the dream is forgotten.
In time the tears dried. She could no longer cry over anything. All the tears had been shed, all the laughs had been had; all the long spent. Leaving nothing to do but to sit stupefied, night after night, under lights made soft beside music with a beat, to rise automatically when someone wearing pants pointed a finger and said 'that one there. — Nelson Algren

That night, the booze felt great, as the warmth of the wine in my stomach spread through my body. I didn't like feeling stupid or out of control, but I liked the way it made everything (laughing, crying, peeing in front of your friends) easier. — John Green

But it was a restless sleep, and throughout the night her dreams were filled with crying children, a woman screaming and a little butterfly, trapped in a cold, grey prison. — Gemma Malley

She remembers talking to God a lot right after everything happened with Luke. She remembers crying and asking why, over and over. Asking for help, for strength, for understanding. Apologizing for what she did wrong. Talking through everything she could have, should have done differently. Begging for the torment to stop.
She remembers belief and trust slowly turning sour. Still, she kept talking to God out of habit. And because she didn't have anyone else to talk to. At night, in the dark sanctuary of her bedroom, alone, she could say the things she'd been keeping quiet. But she stopped expecting an answer. Stopped hoping for one.
After a while, God felt as distant, as uncaring, as everyone else.
And her prayers faded away. — Kathryn Holmes

We ate it like it was medicine. Like it was magic candy that could somehow restore us to a normal life again. We ate ourselves numb and got in our bags and went to sleep.
There was a lot of crying from the little kids and occasionally one of us would yell, "Shut up!"
That's how we got by, that first night. — Emmy Laybourne

And so at last I came out of that distant night, divided between the murmurs of my little world, its dutiful confusions, and those so different (so different?) of all that between two suns abides and passes away. Never once a human voice. But the cows, when the peasants passed, crying in vain to be milked. — Samuel Beckett

I've very emotional. When I went through my first breakup, I thought it was the end of the world, and I thought I was going to die if I didn't have him in my life. It was good to cry it out, and just scream, or call my friends in the middle of the night crying. — Selena Gomez

Among the hardest hit was Terry the Tramp, who immediately loaded up on LSD and spent the next twelve hours locked in the back of a panel truck, shrieking and crying under the gaze of some god he had almost forgotten, but who came down that night to the level of the treetops and just stared - man, he just looked at me, and I tell you I was scared like a little kid. — Hunter S. Thompson

One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life."
The Fog Horn blew. — Ray Bradbury

Another great luxury is letting myself cry - I always feel marvellously peaceful after that. But it is difficult to arrange times for it, as my face takes so long to recover; it isn't safe in the mornings if I am to look normal when I meeter father at lunch, and the afternoons are no better, as Thomas is home by five. It would be all right in bed at night but such a waste, as that is my happiest time. Days when father goes over to read in the Scoatney library are good crying days. — Dodie Smith

For years, I'd never understood what it meant when people said they felt like laughing and crying at the same time, until now. (...) I was waking up every morning - reaching for her, rolling over in bed at night to pull her closer, but she was never there. — Whitney G.

My lovers suffocate me! Crowding my lips, and thick in the pores of my skin, Jostling me through streets and public halls ... coming naked to me at night, Crying by day Ahoy from the rocks of the river ... swinging and chirping over my head, Calling my name from flowerbeds or vines or tangled underbrush, Or while I swim in the bath ... or drink from the pump on the corner ... or the curtain is down at the opera ... or I glimpse at a woman's face in the railroad car; Lighting on every moment of my life, Bussing my body with soft and balsamic busses, Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine — Walt Whitman

What would you think about us doing the ceremony together?"

"The Crying Pools ceremony?" Kami asked. "The one Lillian said was dangerous?"

"Yeah," Ash said. "I mean, we both know it's a big decision. But it's something to think over. It might make all the difference to the town. Look, do you want to come in?" He stepped a little aside. The night air was pulling frost-tipped fingers through Kami's hair, but she stayed where she was.

"Did Jared say that? That it was a big decision?"

"And we both needed to think it through," Ash said.

"Think it through?" Kami repeated, above the sound of the wind. "Jared? Don't you know him at all? If he sounds reasonable, or sensible, or capable of any sort of rational thought, it means he's lying through his teeth! What did you tell him about the ceremony?"

They stared at each other for a moment of horrified silence. "I told him how to do it," — Sarah Rees Brennan

The night was shadows and wind and the smell of a storm on the way, a night for crying until the tears were gone but the ache was left. A night for imagining that you could step out onto the windowsill and say hello to the dark, say I am sad and have the wind say I know. You could say I am alive and the trees would sigh back We are too. You could whisper I am alone and everything ends and the stars in the sky would answer We understand. Or maybe it's ghosts telling you all these things, saying We know, we're alone too, we understand how everything and nothing ends. — Ally Condie

Hunter was bipolar, for crying out loud. He had checked into the nut house on more than one occasion and, honestly, I was already starting to feel the anxiety of living together. I would need to get my martial arts skills up to par to deal with this lunatic. I knew that I would also need to pick up a copy of Kill Bill at my next convenience and take notes as I watched, just in case a fight happened to break out in the kitchen. Also, at night, I had decided that I would need to sleep with either a small pistol or a flamboyant hunting knife under my pillow for a quick grab, in case he skipped his meds one night and decided to kill me. I needed to be prepared for the unthinkable. — Chase Brooks

This is the third night you've kept me up crying. Thought I'd give your mother a rest. Right now you haven't mastered English yet so I thought I'd put this on film for you. I want to show you something. Tony, see that? I built that for you and someday you're going to realize that it represents a lot more than just people's inventions. It represents my life's work. Someday you'll figure it out, and when you do, you'll do even bigger things with your life. I just know it. You're the future. I've created so much in y life, but you know what is the thing I'm proudest of? You. My son. The secret to the future is here! — Alex Irvine

For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saint. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Catasa was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them, the deper they sank. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I tell me:
Let these words be footsteps, because I have a long way to travel. Let the words walk the dirty streets. Let them make their way across the crying grass. Let them stand and breathe and pant smoke in winter evenings. And when they're tired and have fallen down, let them buckle to their feet ad arc around me, watchful.
I want these words to be actions.
Give them flesh and bones, I say to me, and eyes of hunger and desire, so they can write and fight me through the night. — Markus Zusak

I want the late-night drives, the sunset watching, the screaming, the yelling, and the crying. I know I'll definitely want the make-up sex that comes after all of the screaming and crying. I want the good, the bad, and the in-between. All of it is what's going to make us amazing together. — Gail McHugh

For two weeks, I lay awake at night and said Hail Marys over and over to stop my heart from beating too fast. I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to keep somebody safe, of not being able to protect somebody from all the bad stuff you want to protect them from. Knowing they have more tears in them than you will be able to keep them from crying. I realized that Renee had seen me fail, and that she was the person I was going to be failing in front for the rest of my life. It was just a little failure, but it promised bigger failures to come. Additional ones, anyway. But that's who your wife is, the person you fail in front of. Love it so confusing; there's no peace of mind. — Rob Sheffield

That's lovely singing, Saraid," Eile said. "Is Sorry asleep now?"
Saraid shook her head solemnly. "Sorry's sad. Crying." She held the doll against her shoulder, patting its back.
"Oh. Why is she sad?"
"Sorry wants Feeler come back." It was like a punch in the gut. She had thought Saraid had forgotten him; she had assumed new friends and a safe haven would drive the memories of that long journey across country, just the three of them, from her daughter's mind. Foolish. The images of that time were still bright and fresh in her own head; she dreamed of them every night. Why should Saraid be any different just because she was small? — Juliet Marillier

I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. I don't know, like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and you saw them crying in their bed at night or singing to themselves as they make a sandwich or even just walking along the street and even if they were really weird and had no friends at school, I think after seeing them at their most vulnerable you wouldn't be able to help falling in love with them. — Tumblr

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on. — Ray Bradbury

This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing. — Ernest Hemingway,

Guess what?" she said to us. "Someone chopped down a tree in Mrs. Spencer's garden last night."

I stared at her incredulously for a moment. Not a much-loved family member, then, not a nuclear power plant. My eyes went to Florence's face, which was wet with tears. Was she really crying over Mr. Snuggles?

Unobtrusively, I slipped past Lottie and over to the coffee machine, put the biggest cup I could find under it, and pressed the cappuccino button. Twice.

"A tree? But why?" asked Mia with a perfectly judged mixture of curiosity and mild surprise.

"No one knows," said Lottie. "But Mrs. Spencer has already called in Scotland Yard. It was a very valuable tree."

I almost laughed out loud. Yes, sure. I bet they had a special gardening squad to investigate such cases. Scotland Front Yard. Good day, my name is Inspector Griffin and I'm looking into the murder of Mr. Snuggles. — Kerstin Gier

No, I was crying because I was suddenly flooded with an understanding of how little I really knew: about her pains, her secrets, the fantasies that played in her head when she lay in bed at night. Her inner life. — Lena Dunham

If it makes you feel any better, he's been all sad doll lately too."
"What are you talking about, Chels?"
Chelsea stopped walking and stared at Violet.
"Jay. I'm talking about Jay, Vi. I thought you might want to know that you're not the only one who's hurting. He's been moping around school, making it hard to even look at him. He's messed up ... bad." Just like the other night in Violet's bedroom, something close to ... sympathy crossed Chelsea's face.
Violet wasn't sure how to respond.
Fortunately sympathetic Chelsea didn't stick around for long. She seemed to get a grip on herself, and like a switch had been flipped, the awkward moment was over and her friend was back, Chelsea-style: "I swear, every time I see him, I'm halfway afraid he's gonna start crying like a girl or ask to borrow a tampon or something. Seriously, Violet, it's disgusting. Really. Only you can make it stop. Please make it stop. — Kimberly Derting

Black as
the centre of an eye, the centre, a blackness
that sucks at light. I love your vigilance
Night, first mother of songs, give me the voice to sing of you
in those fingers lies the bridle of the four winds.
Crying out, offering words of homage to you, I am
only a shell where the ocean is still sounding.
But I have looked too long into human eyes.
Reduce me now to ashes
Night, like a black sun. — Marina Tsvetaeva

And me not sleeping tonight or tomorrow night or any night for a long while, now that this has started. And he thought of her lying on the bed with the two technicians standing straight over her, not bent with concern, but only standing straight, arms folded. And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty.

How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn't it? 'What a shame! You're not in love with anyone!' And why not? — Ray Bradbury

I lay in bed at night crying to myself. The only one who loved me and watched over me was someone I couldn't see or hear or touch. — Marilyn Monroe

In my senior year of high school, I was working at a dealership washing cars. For some reason, I asked them to give me a shot as a salesman for a shift. What happened was I sold two cars in one day and they offered me the position. After a while I decided I didn't want the job and so I told the manager I'd contracted HIV from having unprotected sex. It was only half true but I'd been feeling sick and somehow convinced myself I was really dying. I remember I sat in my boss' office, the both of us crying. Later than night he calls my dad and says 'I'm sorry your son has HIV.' It was terrible. — Nick Thune

For years she had had her back against the stone wall of Rhett's love and had taken it as much for granted as she had taken Melanie's love, flattering herself that she drew her strength from herself alone. And even as she had realized earlier in the evening that Melanie had been beside her in her bitter campaigns against life, now she knew that silent in the background, Rhett had stood, loving her, understanding her, ready to help. Rhett at the bazaar, reading her impatience in her eyes and leading her out in the reel, Rhett helping her out of the bondage of mourning, Rhett convoying her through the fire and explosion the night Atlanta fell, Rhett lending her the money that gave her her start, Rhett who comforted her when she woke in the nights crying with fright from her dreams-why, no man did such things without loving a woman to distraction! — Margaret Mitchell

I tend to wake up in the middle of the night with ideas crying to be documented. — Bryan Batt

Love Dogs

One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
"So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?"

The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
"Why did you stop praising?"
"Because I've never heard anything back."
"This longing
you express is the return message."

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them. — Jalaluddin Rumi

I love every minute of fatherhood, staying up all night, changing nappies, kids crying, I find it really funny and inspiring. It connects you to the world in a new way. — Elton John

The most amazing thing about the Christmas story is its relevance. It is at home in every age and fits into every mood of life. It is not simply a lovely tale once told, but eternally contemporary. It is the voice crying out in every wilderness. It is as meaningful in our time as in that long-ago night when shepherds followed the light of the star to the manger of Bethlehem. — Joseph R. Sizoo

At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad's muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one's skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you'd struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don't want to forget, but you don't want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist. — V.J. Campilan

For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human. — Clive Barker

No one paid much attention when he left. They continued to eat and drink and talk and laugh over their suffering, and occasionally run to the bathroom to be ill. It was this way more or less every night and every morning. Strangers appeared in his hotel room, always a wreck after the previous night. In the morning, they stuck themselves back together again. They rubbed at raccoon-eyed faces full of smeared makeup, looked for lost hats and feathers and beads and phone numbers and shoes and hours. It wasn't a bad life. It wouldn't last, but nothing ever did.
They would all be like Alfie in the end, crying on his sofa at dawn and regretting it all. Which was why Magnus stayed away from those kinds of problems. Keep moving. Keep dancing. — Cassandra Clare

If you should ask me where I've been all this time
I have to say "Things happen."
I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,
on the river ruined in its own duration:
I know nothing save things the birds have lost,
the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.
Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock
with day? Why the dark night swilling round
in our mouths? And why the dead? — Pablo Neruda

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

In the square below,' said the Happy Prince, 'there stands a little match-girl. She has let her matches fall in the gutter, and they are all spoiled. Her father will beat her if she does not bring home some money, and she is crying. She has no shoes or stockings, and her little head is bare. Pluck out my other eye, and give it to her, and her father will not beat her.'

'I will stay with you one night longer,' said the Swallow, 'but I cannot pluck out your eye. You would be quite blind then.'

'Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow,' said the Prince, 'do as I command you.'

So he plucked out the Prince's other eye, and darted down with it. He swooped past the match-girl, and slipped the jewel into the palm of her hand. 'What a lovely bit of glass,' cried the little girl; and she ran home, laughing.

Then the Swallow came back to the Prince. 'You are blind now,' he said, 'so I will stay with you always. — Oscar Wilde

We may feel in control, but we never truly are unless we understand people. Controlling our environment is no longer about blocking the wind, it's about knowing why the serving lady was crying last night, or why a particular guard always loses at cards. — Brandon Sanderson

The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor. Glanton sat his horse and looked long out upon this scene. Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded. All the sky seemed troubled and night came quickly over the evening land and small gray birds flew crying softly after the fled sun. He chucked up the horse. He passed and so passed all into the problematical destruction of darkness. — Cormac McCarthy

My personal beliefs were shaped more by experience and by watching the news when I was young: images of angelic-looking college students in Mississippi crying like the world was ending because black people were being allowed on their campus; the slow mounting horror of Vietnam on the evening news every night; sitting with my parents in front of the TV and being appalled at the way the Chicago police were treating the protesters during the '68 Democratic convention. Being eyed with suspicion because of my age and the way I wore my hair. — James Vance

An embrace from him left scratches on my back that sometimes wept blood, yet my brothers and I fought to be the first in his arms when he returned from work each evening. The same injuries inflicted in anger would have sent us crying to our mother's skirts. I fell asleep each night feeling his hand on my back like a shield.
Fathers. — Christopher Moore

He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed he understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother's love, his brother's ceasless crying: he was alreday forgiving me my shortcomings as a father; he was a distillation of a dozen generations, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the this slip of his ribs. I'd hold him to the window and he's stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through the interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky. — Anthony Doerr

To tell the truth, I was beginning to think you would be in awe of anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. If you could watch them making up little songs, and doing funny faces in the mirror; if you saw them high-fiving a leaf on a tree, or stopping to watch a green inchworm hanging midair from an invisible thread, or just being really different and lonely and crying sometimes at night. Seeing them, the real them, you couldn't help but think that anyone and everyone is amazing. — Michelle Cuevas