Kept In The Dark Quotes & Sayings

It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-looking lady she was; dark, like her brother, whom she greatly resembled in face and voice; and with very heavy eyebrows, nearly meeting over her large nose, as if, being disabled by the wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers, she had carried them to that account. She brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite. I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was. — Charles Dickens

A bit of information, kept in the dark is a secret. That same bit of information put to the light becomes truth...even if it's a lie. — J. Evan Johnson

They hammered on the outer gate and called, but there was at first no answer; and then to their surprise someone blew a horn, and the lights in the windows went out. A voice shouted in the dark: 'Who's that? Be off! You can't come in. Can't you read the notice: No admittance between sundown and sunrise?' 'Of course we can't read the notice in the dark,' Sam shouted back. 'And if hobbits of the Shire are to be kept out in the wet on a night like this, I'll tear down your notice when I find it. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up. — Cormac McCarthy

... none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something that I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and were blind. — Martha Gellhorn

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. — Emile Zola

The woods played on our imaginations the most after dark, in our dorms as we were trying to fall asleep. You almost thought then you could hear the wind rustling the branches, and talking about it seemed only to make things worse. I remember one night, when we were furious with Marge K.
she'd done something really embarrassing to us during the day
we chose to punish her by hauling her out of bed, holding her face against the window pane and ordering her to look up at the woods. At first she kept her eyes screwed shut, but we twisted her arms and forced open her eyelids until she saw the distant outline against the moonlit sky, and that was enough to ensure for her a sobbing night of terror. — Kazuo Ishiguro

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering. — Sylvia Plath

There were people dying everywhere getting massacred in every town and village, there were people being picked up and thrown into dark jails in unknown parts, there were dungeons in the city where hundreds of young men were kept in heavy chains and from where many never emerged alive, there were thousands who had disappeared leaving behind women with photographs and perennial waiting ,there were multitudes of dead bodies on the roads, in hospital beds, in fresh martyrs' graveyards and scattered casually on the snow of mindless borders. — Mirza Waheed

In the night, I am kept awake by the endless chatter of my inner self. I hear it speak softly of old hurts and fondly of past loves, while its demands and anxieties resound throughout me in multitudes.
I could be calm and composed all day long, but the moment it is dark, my mind riots. — Beau Taplin

When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again. — Russell Hoban

He told himself she wasn't really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear. — David Goodis

I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark. — Jane Mayer

an aching hollowness in the bosom, a dark cold speck at the heart, an obscure and boding sense of something that must be kept out of sight of the conscience; — Lionel Fisher

People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark. — Tom Stoppard

My parents kept a small cabin the mountains. It was a simple thing, just four walls, and very dark inside. A heavy felt curtain blotted out whatever light made it through the canopy of huge pines and down into the cabin's only window. There was a queen-size bed in there, an armchair, and a wood-burning stove. It wasn't an old cabin. I think my parents built it in the seventies from a kit. In a few spots the wood beams were branded with the word HOME-RITE. But the spirit of the place me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say there was a store coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials. It was deadly quiet up there. You could hear your own heart beating if you listened. I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it - I've never been very clear on that distinction. — Ottessa Moshfegh

It was like walking into another world. While the mansion was bright, warm, comfy and filled with sound and color, the outside was dark, cold, colorless and devoid of people.
I found myself standing beside Thomas in the street. The paved road felt so cold it was hurting my feet. I kept moving them up and down, afraid my skin would freeze to the pavement. My heart was racing already and I felt a bit out of breath. If we stood there much longer i was going to hyperventilate. — J.C. Joranco

Zhou fell in behind an administrator carrying a wooden box full of scrolls. His own arms were laden down with scrolls and a scholar's robe covered the dark clothes, the unfortunate previous owner would wake in a few hours with a large bruise and a headache to match. He kept his head down as they approached the guarded door to the keep. — G.R. Matthews

YOU MUSTN'T BE AFRAID OF DEATH
you're a deathless soul
you can't be kept in a dark grave
you're filled with God's glow
be happy with your beloved
you can't find any better
the world will shimmer
because of the diamond you hold
when your heart is immersed
in this blissful love
you can easily endure
any bitter face around
in the absence of malice
there is nothing but
happiness and good times
don't dwell in sorrow my friend
ghazal number 2594 — Rumi

The highest development was in the Egyptian and Cabalistic systems, and it was blended with Christian thought in the schools of the Neo-Platonists and the Gnostics ... Its studies were only kept alive during the Dark Ages among the Jews who were the chief exponents of its Cabalistic aspect ... and it is still alive today. — Dion Fortune

Long after all the chocolates were eaten, and the cousins had gone, we kept the chocolate-box in the linen-drawer in the dining-room sideboard, waiting for some ceremonial use that never presented itself. It was still full of the empty chocolate cups of dark, fluted paper. In the wintertime I would sometimes go into the cold dining room and sniff at the cups, inhaling their smell of artifice and luxury; I would read again the descriptions on the map provided on the inside of the box-top: hazelnut, creamy nougat, Turkish delight, golden toffee, peppermint cream. — Alice Munro

Veda began it, but when she finished it, or whether she finished it, Mildred never quite knew. Little quivers went through her and they kept going through her the rest of the night, during the supper party, when Veda sat with the white scarf wound around her throat, during the brief half hour, while she undressed Veda, and put the costume away; in the dark, while she lay there alone, trying to sleep, not wanting to sleep.
This was the climax of Mildred's life. — James M. Cain

I wanted you to watch, so I stomped around the room to wake you before I got in the shower. Didn't you wonder why the light was on? It wasn't for me, I can see in the dark. And then I kept the water cold so the glass wouldn't fog. — Jeaniene Frost

Sorry, is my new Djinn name Mushroom ? Because I don't like being kept in the dark and fed bullshit, David. Just so you know. — Rachel Caine

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. — George Orwell

We are in the dark places of the earth," said Madman. "Where all the ancient and most dangerous secrets are kept. There are Old Things down here, sleeping all around us, in the earth and in the living rock, and in the spaces between spaces. Keep your voices down. Some of these old creatures sleep but lightly, and even their dreams can have force and substance in our limited world. We have come among forgotten gods and sleeping devils, from the days before the world settled down and declared itself sane. — Simon R. Green

Suppose ... burglars had made entry into this ... [library]. Picture them seated here on this floor, pouring the light of their dark-lanterns over some books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were sent to jail. For all I know, they may next be sent to Congress. — Mark Twain

Flag: What are you really up to?

Waller: You want the big picture?

Flag: No, I like being fed a steady stream of crap and kept in the dark like a mushroom. — Marv Wolfman

But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable. — Elizabeth Strout

The word of God directs us in our work and way, and a dark place indeed the world would be without it. The commandment is a lamp kept burning with the oil of the Spirit, as a light to direct us in the choice of our way, and the steps we take in that way. — Matthew Henry

As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop. — Barbara Kingsolver

So," dark Susurre said quietly, "if you follow the curve ... in a way your Damon did die to save Fell's Church from another massacre like the one on that Japanease island. He kept saying that was what he'd come to the Nether World to do. Do you not think he would be satisfied? At peace?"
"At PEACE?!" Stefan spat bitterly, and Sage growled.
"Woman," you obviously have never met Damon Salvatore before." The tone in his voice
more resonant, more threatening somehow
made Elena finally break off her staredown with the red-haired Idola. She turned and looked
and saw the enormous room filled with Sage's outspread wings. — L.J.Smith

The dell was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Here it is undeveloped, a roll of film with all its mysteries locked up. I never took it anyplace, just left it waiting in a drawer dreaming of stars. That was our time, to see if Lottie Carson was who we thought she was, all those shots we took, cracking up, kissing with our mouths open, laughing, but we never finished it. We thought we had time, running after her, jumping on the bus and trying to glimpse her dimple through the tired nurses arguing in scrubs and the moms on the phone with the groceries in the laps of the kids in the strollers. We hid behind the mailboxes and lampposts half a block away as she kept moving through her neighborhood, where I've never been, the sky getting dark on only the first date, thinking all the while we'd develop it later. — Daniel Handler

It didn't help that Oscar showed up in my dreams constantly ... I kept telling him to get actual, that he'd died, and he'd say, No no, honey, you got it all wrong. Oh, man, look at my hand. And I'd look at his hand that he held out, and I'd grab it, reaching out in dreamtime, doubting him, and it was there all right, but the touch of it, the tight tough skin exactly like Oscar's, would startle me with terror and love, and I'd wake up by myself in my apartment in the dark like a flashlight you've just switched on, with the traffic moving on the street outside the window and the headlights lighting the ceiling, and this big broken hole in me that Oscar had left behind, by dying. — Charles Baxter

ROOT CELLAR
Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath. — Theodore Roethke

He set his whisky tumbler on the table, but kept his fingers around it. "What do you see in my eyes?"...
"Tell me, lass," he urged softly.
She suddenly understood the term 'old soul,' because one sat before her now. And, as if opening a book, she caught a glimpse of Asher. The words then tumbled out of her mouth. "Endlessness. Sorrow. Agony. Distress. Rage. — Donna Grant

He felt that he was still groping in the dark; he had chosen his path but kept looking back, wondering whether he had misread the signs, whether he should not have taken the other way. — J.K. Rowling

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow, this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable that it might well have been a dream. — G.K. Chesterton

My eyes kept skipping back to her, drawn to her face like a lone candle flame in the dark — Alexandra Bracken

Make no mistake, Elphaba, Goddess Magick was potent in the old days. During the Dark Ages the Catholic Church had their hands full fighting it. Unfortunately, in large measure the Church won that war, relegating Wicca, Druidism and the rest to the fringes of society. With vastly weakened power."
"Except yours, Nick."
"I've always been a special case, Elphaba," Nick explained. "Even though I began my career as an alchemist, I soon turned away from that practice and forged my own path. I uncovered my own secrets and kept them secret. That's how I was able to maintain my power for so long. — Abramelin Keldor

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

As far as the Council is concerned, the U.S. Wardens are a bunch of mushrooms."
"Eh?"
"Kept in the dark and fed on bullshit. — Jim Butcher

We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror, and there is, as I have said before, a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches. When we were children and frightened of the dark, my grandmother used to say if we kept our eyes closed we would not see it. That was when I noticed the correspondence between the space within the circle of my skull and the space around me. I saw just the same figure against the lid of my eye or the wall of my room, or in the trees beyond my window. Even the illusion of perimeters fails when families are separated. — Marilynne Robinson

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. — Sylvia Plath

Abe's face came back into focus. "Greetings, Zmey," I said weakly. Somehow, him being here didn't surprise me. "Nice of you to slither on in." He shook his head, wearing a rueful smile.
"I think you've outdone me when it comes to sneaking around dark corners. I thought you were on your way back to Montana."
"Next time, make sure you write a few more details into your bargains. Or just pack me up and send me back to the U. S. For real."
"Oh," he said, "that's exactly what I intend to do."
He kept smiling as he said it, but somehow, I had a feeling he wasn't joking. — Richelle Mead

One of the most persistent fallacies about the Christian Church is that it kept learning alive during the Dark and Middle Ages. What the Church did was to keep learning alive in the monasteries, while preventing the spread of knowledge outside them ... Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, nine-tenths of Christian Europe was illiterate. — Margaret E. Knight

In summer, waiting for night, we'd pose against the afterglow on corners, watching traffic cruise through the neighborhood. Sometimes, a car would go by without its headlights on and we'd all yell, "Lights!"
"Lights!" we'd keep on yelling until the beams flashed on. It was usually immediate - the driver honking back thanks, or flinching embarrassed behind the steering wheel, or gunning past, and we'd see his red taillights blink on.
But there were times - who knows why? - when drunk or high, stubborn, or simply lost in that glide to somewhere else, the driver just kept driving in the dark, and all down the block we'd hear yelling from doorways and storefronts, front steps, and other corners, voices winking on like fireflies: "Lights! Your lights! Hey, lights! — Stuart Dybek

And in the bug, which moved upward more surely on the gentler grade, he kept looking out between them as the road unwound, affording occasional glimpses of the Overlook Hotel, its massive bank of westward-looking windows reflecting back the sun. It was the place he had seen in the midst of the blizzard, the dark and booming place where some hideously familiar figure sought him down long corridors carpeted with jungle. — Stephen King

I dealt with the White Council my whole life, so I'm used to being treated like a mushroom - " "Eh?" Ascher asked. "Kept in the dark and fed bullshit," Binder reported calmly. "Ah. — Jim Butcher

In the Lonely Hour is about a guy that I fell in love with last year, and he didn't love me back. I think I'm over it now, but I was in a very dark place. I kept feeling lonely in the fact that I hadn't felt love before. — Sam Smith

Of course we in Europe also have epidemic, structural sexual violence. Violence is always the dark core of dominance. The men who are now coming to us from Islamic cultural circles are, of course, shaped by conditions there, which are still much more antiquated than here. That's a problem that we have ignored for far too long. In the name of a false tolerance, we have accepted that women are kept at home like prisoners and are forcibly married. — Alice Schwarzer

But it was the second guy who caught my eye. Like the girl, he, too, paused by the door, seeming even more wary than she looked. The sunlight streaming in through the windows highlighted the rich honey in his dark chocolate brown hair, even as it cast his face in shadow. The tan skin of his arms resembled marble - hard, but smooth and supple at the same time.
He must have passed through the mist spewed up by the fountain outside, because his black T-shirt was wet in places and the damp patches clung to his skin. The wetness allowed me to see just how muscled his chest was. Oh, yeah, I totally ogled that part of him, right up until I spotted the silver cuff on his right wrist.
Given the angle, I couldn't tell what crest was stamped into the metal, but I glanced at the others, who also wore cuffs. I sighed. So they belonged to some Family then. Wonderful. This day just kept getting better. — Jennifer Estep

I love you," he murmured. "Oh, Bree, I do love you." She didn't answer, but a hand floated up from the dark and lay along his cheek, gentle as a tendril of seaweed. She kept it there while he took her, laid open in trust, while her other hand held his beating heart. — Diana Gabaldon

Unless people can be kept in the dark, it is best for those who love the truth to give them the full light. — Richard Whately

Nobody knows because Team Obama has conveniently arranged for you to be kept in the dark on your health insurance costs until after everyone votes next week. — Hugh Hewitt

In the lobby, an old woman with legs wrapped in elastic bandages mopped the floor with filthy water. She kept missing the same spot, over and over. There was the overpowering smell of disinfectant, bad tobacco, and wet wool. This was the smell of Russia indoors, the smell of the woman in front of you on line, the smell of every elevator. Near an abandoned newsstand, dozens of overcoats hung on long rows of pegs, somber and dark, lightly steaming, like nags in a stable. — David Remnick

Toward nightfall, Khrenov's temperature had risen. The thermometer was warm, alive - the column of mercury climbed high on the little red ladder. For a long time he muttered unintelligibly, kept biting his lips and gently shaking his head. Then he fell asleep. Natasha undressed by a candle's wan flame, and saw her reflection in the murky glass of the window - her pale, thin neck, the dark braid that had fallen across her clavicle. She stood like that, in motionless languor, and suddenly it seemed to her that the room, together with the couch, the table littered with cigarette stubs, the bed on which, with open mouth, a sharp-nosed, sweaty old man slept restlessly - all this started to move, and was now floating, like the deck of a ship, into the black night. — Vladimir Nabokov

Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy garden. He was jealous of the very light and air getting to her, and they kept her close. He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the little windows, left the strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it would over the house-front, the moss to accumulate on the untrimmed fruit trees in the red-walled garden, the weeds to over-run its green and yellow walks. He surrounded her with images of sorrow and desolation. He caused her to be filled with fears of the place and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext of correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink about it in the dark. When her mind was most depressed and fullest of terrors, then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places from which he overlooked her, and present himself as her sole resource. — Charles Dickens

If you want to - if you want to engage in conspiracy theories that the White House and the vice president intended no one to ever know - like "The New York Times" - we would have been kept in the dark forever. I just think that's completely irrational. — Kate O'Beirne

A hand touched my shoulder, shaking me. I was back on the bus. It was dark and warm and I just wanted to sleep, but Chloe kept shaking my shoulder.
"Tori?" she whispered. "We're at a truck stop. It's Derek. He ... he's not feeling good. It could be the Change again. He needs to get off the bus. I'm going with him."
"Mmmph."
"Are you awake? Did you hear what I said?"
"Yeah, yeah. Derek Changing. You going."
She said something else, but I was already drifting back to sleep. Then she was gone.
I bolted upright in the pool house. Chloe had told me they were getting off the bus. Damn it! I'd screwed up. — Kelley Armstrong

The job he did kept his brain busy enough to cover up the anxiety; to distract him from his dark thoughts. He could deal with lists and finances, any amount of work, any sort of job. That came easy to him. But love? Love was alien and frightening. The anxiety he felt at just the thought of her leaving him made him feel so severely sick sometimes, he couldn't even work. He was so in love with her. — Sarah Michelle Lynch

When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment. — Charles Dickens

He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was in painful doubt as to what was really thought of them by the leading minds of Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had been the writer of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk, and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory. These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies. For — George Eliot

When I entered the drum, why did it make my heart start pounding? In the small, cramped space, secretly, I was incredibly smitten by her.
While playing, we both decided to try and crawl into the drum. It was dark and smelled faintly of metal. Beyond the mouth of the round drum, we could see the sunlight.
If I turned around, our bodies fit into the drum exactly, and she was right there. Her breathing was echoing. The air around us was very humid.
Somehow the burning feeling in my heart came boiling over, and I put my face close to hers, and gave her a little kiss. Of course it was on the lips.
It was a gentle sensation, and it was the first time I'd ever felt such a strange emotion. She responded with the same feeling. So I kept on kissing her. They were light kisses, but my heart was beating wildly.It was an amazing first time. — Gackt

As soon as he was half-awake he slipped his knickers off. Holding them close to his face, he handled them loosely for a moment with an absent expression, then suddenly buried his nose in them, his dark eyes huge, his face monstrous with the wisdom of evil. As well as the blood and the seepage from last night's ejaculation he had shit himself lavishly in his sleep, a sloppy, yellow liquid. Having spent a while burying his face in them, he folded the knickers up and put them carefully to one side on top of a stack of others. He would never wash them; he would never wear them again. Every secretion that had occurred in his underclothes, before, during, or sometimes just after a moment of action was a souvenir to be preciously kept and safeguarded. — Derek Raymond

If you focus your eyes towards the horizon, everything and everyone walking in front of you becomes a blurry mass. That's what everyone else became. All of their dark wool suits began to mesh into one, and they began to rhythmically march in unison, all while I gazed at the sliver of sky that seemed to be pressed tightly in between the skyscrapers. I kept on walking and staring at the sky, and I began to notice the skyscrapers becoming larger and larger, and before I knew it, I had to turn to get to my building, and of course, the automat. — Cristina Martin

White people found that freedom was indeed indivisible. We had kept saying in the dark days of apartheid's oppression that white South Africans would never be truly free until we blacks were free as well. Many thought it was just another Tutu slogan, irresponsible as all his others had been. Today they were experiencing it as a reality. I used to refer to an intriguing old film The Defiant Ones, in which Sidney Poitier was one of the stars. Two convicts escape from a chain gang. They are manacled together, the one white, the other black. They fall into a ditch with slippery sides. The one convict claws his way nearly to the top and out of the ditch but cannot make it because he is bound to his mate, who has been left at the bottom in the ditch. The only way they can make it is together as they strive up and up and up together and eventually make their way over the side wall and out. — Desmond Tutu

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. — Francisco Jimenez

I like to pretend I'm a prisoner kept in a dark, dank cell who's only allowed fifteen minutes a day in the yard, so that I can remember to really enjoy looking up. — Matthew Quick

They watched her sit, holding the bundle up before her, the lamp just at her elbow belabored by a moth whose dark shape cast upon her face appeared captive within the delicate skull, the thin and roselit bone, like something kept in a china mask — Cormac McCarthy

Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to. — Neil Gaiman

As I savored the meal, I struggled against the dark force that kept tugging at me, telling me I was never going to leave; adhering to my consciousness like sap, or tar, or glue; enveloping me in a sticky sickness that drained my vitality. I felt myself growing old as I sat there, the joints stiffening, the bones aching, the sense of identity melting away like a forgotten candle left to burn itself out. As I settled back into my cot for the evening hibernation, I understood I had been captured. I realized my spirit was ensnared. I knew what must be done. Whatever the cost, I told myself, I would be back on the road at dawn. — Steven Hubbell

I don't lose. Do you hear me? I don't lose and that includes losing you. I'm done being kept in the dark. Im done feeling like you're slipping right past me. You are not saying goodbye to me. I'm in love with you and you love me back. You are staying. — Katie McGarry

When you were strung out

and I kissed you
I imagined your mouth

a mound of cocaine,
inhaling your breath

like powder as I pushed
into you and you pulled

me with your bruised thighs.
Some nights we fucked so

slowly I dissolved
like a Quaalude in a glass

of vodka, and you drank
me down. We kept the room dark,

so we could not see
each other with our eyes

rolled back - or was it
because we did not want

to see ourselves.
It's taken me too long to think

of that, the way we never
thought the other would go,

and then one night
I woke up

sober
and yes,

still there. — Sean Thomas Dougherty

Alone he watched the sky go out, dark deepen to its full. He kept his eyes on the engulfed horizon, for he knew from experience what last throes it was capable of. And in the dark he could hear better too, he could hear the sounds the long day had kept from him, human murmurs for example, and the rain on the water. — Samuel Beckett

I began reading Harper Lee's novel in the skimpy shade of a pine outside my grandmother's house, fat beagles pressing against me, begging for attention, ignored. At dark, I kept reading, first on the couch, a bologna sandwich in one hand, then in my bed, by the light of a 60-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling on an orange drop cord. When my mother came in from her job as a maid and unplugged my chandelier, I replayed the story in my head until it was crowded out by dreams. I woke the next morning, smelling biscuits, and reached for the book again. — Rick Bragg

women possessed closely guarded answers to the secrets of the universe, and men would forever be kept in the dark. — Shelly Alexander

I'd better go," he said, without leaving.
That one eye, the blue one, just kept staring up at him. Bloodshot, with a cut across the brow above it, the thing shouldn't have been able to focus. But it was.
"I have to go," Blay said finally.
Without leaving.
Damn him, he didn't know what the hell he was doing
A tear escaped from that eye. Welling up along the lower lid, it coalesced at the far corner, formed a crystal circle, and grew so fat it couldn't hold on to the lashes. Slipping free, it meandered downward, getting lost in dark hair at the temple. — J.R. Ward

Being near Tom and Doug at night kept me from having to say to myself I am not afraid whenever I heard a branch snap in the dark or the wind shook so fiercely it seemed something bad was about to happen. But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I'd come, I'd realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really
all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging along with someone else. — Cheryl Strayed

The lawyer was a short, ugly, little man. He stood about three feet taller than his desk's two foot eight inch frame and he had dark eyes. Lois couldn't tell if they were black or an extremely dark brown. His hair was dirty blonde and very messy. He looked as if he had just crawled out of bed. His white button up shirt was tucked in on only one side and the other side hung out freely. He wore a pair of tan khakis and a pair of black loafers. His skin almost matched the khakis which was extremely creepy and Lois kept thinking the man wasn't wearing pants. — Rebecca McNutt

I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me — Oscar Wilde

I couldn't tell what colour her eyes were. They were wet and dark and shining, like pools of deep, still water. For a second I thought I could see pictures in them, like I was looking right inside her to where her memories were. She smiled, and I wondered if she knew what I'd seen or if she could see the pictures I kept hidden inside myself. — Glenda Millard

Careful what you wish for; the darkness in my heart is kept in check by the smallest amount of light. — Liberty Stone

Sorry, Jericho. I almost didn't recognize you with your dick in your pants. If you'll excuse me, I have to get home." I tried to flounce off, but walking in short steps with a paper sack around my hips wasn't a graceful way to make an exit. He rolled the truck beside me and the engine rumbled, but he didn't say a word. So I walked a little faster. He drove a little faster. Finally, I broke into a run. Jericho hit the gas and kept up with me. "Get in the goddamn truck, Isabelle." "No.""You're a female wolf running naked in the street. Get in." "I'm not naked," I panted. "I'm wearing recyclables."
Dark, Dannika (2014-07-27). Five Weeks (Seven Series #3) (pp. 49-50). Kindle Edition. — Dannika Dark

in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, — Marcel Proust

You may have an occasion to be traveling in southern Maine yourself one of these days. Pretty part of the countryside. You may even stop by Tookey's Bar for a drink. Nice place. They kept the name just the same. So have your drink, and then my advice to you is to keep right on moving north. Whatever you do, don't go up that road to Jerusalem's Lot. Especially not after dark. There's a little girl somewhere out there. And I think she's still waiting for her good-night kiss. — Stephen King

I had expected the well to be full for some reason.
Not that it had ever been before.
I kept looking for signs of water in the dark insides.
I heard my bucket clank as it hit
Against the walls that held nothing.
I look at the bucket that came up empty
And made a decision that changed my life.
I will keep my bucket and find another well. — Joan Bauer

I can't help but think of the phrase ' sometimes it is better to be kept in the dark than be blinded by the light. — Anna Todd

You know I love you," I whispered in his ear.
"I know," he whispered back, turned, I pulled my arms away and he got on his knees in front of me, his hands framing my face.
I looked in his dark eyes.
"Do you know how much?" I kept whispering.
"How much, baby?" Lahn kept whispering too.
I bent my forehead to his and told him the truth. "More than my world. — Kristen Ashley

When it comes to branding and the ever-changing social media phenomenon, you're not a mushroom. In other words, you shouldn't be kept in the dark and fed a pile of...well, you get the idea. — David Brier

What have I kept of Rae Evans from the moment when she half stood behind her desk and held out her hand to shake mine? I think it is the impression of white--white face, white shirt between two halves of a power dark suit. Hers were night colors, and though it was early in the morning, and she was my new boss, it seemed as though the business day had not quite caught up to us, and maybe never would. — Dorothy Johnston

I scurry out to the three-way mirror. With an extra-large sweatshirt over the top, you can hardly tell that they are Effert's jeans. Still no Mom. I adjust the mirror so I can see reflections of reflections, miles and miles of me and my new jeans. I hook my hair behind my ears. I should have washed it. My face is dirty. I lean into the mirror. Eyes after eyes after eyes stare back at me. Am I in there somewhere? A thousand eyes blink. No makeup. Dark circles. I pull the side flaps of the mirror in closer, folding myself into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store. My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into dissecting cubes. I saw a movie once where a woman was burned over eighty percent of her body and they had to wash all the dead skin off. They wrapped her in bandages, kept her drugged, and waited for skin grafts. They actually sewed her into a new skin. — Laurie Halse Anderson

In a democracy, citizens pass judgment on their government, and if they are kept in the dark about what their government is doing, they cannot be in a position to make well-grounded decisions. — Peter Singer

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating. — A.S. Byatt

The kind of smile that has kept a froggy, dark sort of surprise in its back pocket, and won't spoil it too soon. — Catherynne M Valente

The purposeful restriction of knowledge has been at the heart of untold misery and hardship in this world. Serfs were kept illiterate so as to not jeopardize the feudal system. Slaves were kept in the dark on a variety of subjects so as to not provide them the possibility of escape. — Niger Innis

Something lay in the middle of it a few yards on, a dark object like a little heap of brown leaves. Thinking it was leaves I saw no reason for comment; but Gertrud, whose eyes are very sharp, exclaimed. 'What, do you see August?' I cried. 'No, no - but there in the road - the tea-basket!' It was indeed the tea-basket, shaken out as it naturally would be on the removal of the bodies that had kept it in its place, come to us like the ravens of old to give us strength and sustenance. 'It still contains food,' said Gertrud, hurrying towards it. 'Thank heaven,' said I. We — Elizabeth Von Arnim

He whispered, "Follow me," though he had no idea where to go. There was a time, not long ago, when his instincts had kept him alive on the dark streets, the long beats, with rain hammering down on gun-toting punks, slick drug dealers, prostitutes with sharp teeth. He'd thought it a mad world then, and he thought it now, It's a sharp, mad world. It'll bleed you out. — Lee Thompson

An Afternoon in the Stacks
Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move. — William Stafford