Living In The Dark Quotes & Sayings

Men at the close of the dark Ages may have been rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean. They were like children; the first beginnings of their rude arts have all the clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive them in Europe as a whole living under little local governments, feudal in so far as they were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic and carrying a far more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly imperial as far as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy something had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity; the republic, Italy, was dotted with little states, largely democratic in their ideals, and often filled with real citizens. But the city no longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for defence against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers. — G.K. Chesterton

My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people are often in hiding from themselves. Two and a quarter million people live in the City of Light: you will see many of them and you will pass them in the street, but when you see Notre Dame after dark and walk home and perhaps stop to have a drink in the Marais, you can feel that the only thing that is missing from your experience is the common dependence on someone to distract your attention. You are living without it: you are on vacation. — Andrew O'Hagan

The population at large is neither 'ordinary' or 'normal'. They seem to be bound together by a collective ignorance of themselves and what they are. They have, every one of them, got their deep dark thoughts with many a skeleton rattling in their secret cupboards. Their fascination with 'types' like myself plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them. I believe they can identify with these 'dark images and acts' and loathe anything which reminds them of this dark side of themselves. — Dennis Nilsen

I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers. But I wish I were a poet.
Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, 'Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open.'
I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on?
I wish I had made things for life to depend on. — Jonathan Safran Foer

A writer can't just be well-educated or good at research; to build a living, breathing world with interesting characters, you have to write from the gut. I'm not saying you have to live your life like a fantasy adventure. The trick is the ability to synthesize your own everyday experiences into your fiction. Infuse your characters with believable emotions and motivations. Infuse your world with rich sensory detail. For that you have to be in touch with your own existence and your own soul, the dark and the light of it. — Lynn Flewelling

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living ... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry ... — Thomas Pynchon

It was easy to be good and kind in times of plenty. The trying times were the moments that defined a man.
And love? Love was something that did much to change a person. It brought joy as it brought suffering, and in turn brought about those moments that defined one's character. Love gave life to the lifeless. It was the greatest of all living powers.
But, as with all things, love had a dark side to it. — Renee Ahdieh

Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity's machine. — Oscar Wilde

In San Francisco - life goes on. Hope rises and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street. A young girl looks out a window and wishes she were married. A drunk sleeps under a bridge. It is tomorrow. — Hunter S. Thompson

Resting beside her, he seemed to Ildiko a living statue, carved from dark granite into a form of supple elegance and power. He was beautiful, and the tremor change in her perception of him robbed her lungs of air.
He opened both eyes suddenly, making her jump. Two shimmering gold coins stared at her unblinking. "Good evening, wife," he said in a voice raspy with the remnants of sleep. A closed-lip smile curved his mouth upward and deepened the tiny lines that fanned from the corners of his eyes. "You're staring. Do I have a fly on my nose?"
Fighting down a blush at being caught gawking at her own husband, Ildiko lightly tapped the tip of his nose with one finger. "I was trying to find a way to kill it without punching you in the face. Lucky for you, it flew away. — Grace Draven

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. — T. S. Eliot

She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became cold and short and dark. Living things hid themselves away. Spring came when she was released and made her slow way up to the world again. The world became brighter and bolder in order to welcome her back. It began to be filled with warmth and light. The animals dared to wake, they dared to have their young. Plants dared to send out buds and shoots. Life dared to come back. — David Almond

A realization washed over her in that cold, dark space: this was how virtually all living things born on earth have died - with teeth tearing through their muscle and bones. We humans have computers and soap and houses but it doesn't change the fact that everything that walks is nothing but food for something else. — David Wong

Before I moved here, I never got the whole love-triangle thing. You know, in movies or romance novels or whatnot, where there's one chick that all the guys are drooling over, even though you can't see anything particularly special about her. But oh, no, they both must have her. And she's like, oh dear, however will I choose? William is so sensitive, he understands me, he swept me off my feet, oh misery, blubber, blubber, but how can I go on living without Rafe and his devil-may-care ways and his dark and only-a-little-abusive love? Upchuck. — Cynthia Hand

Boy, it sure was some strange Christmas, she told herself as she opened the living room door. And then she stopped dead. Because her present wasn't under the huge lighted Christmas tree. It was sitting on the sofa, looking toward her furiously, with a glass of whiskey in one lean hand. "Merry Christmas," Winthrop said curtly.
Her mouth flew open. He had a bow stuck on the pocket of his gray vested suit, and he looked hung over and pale and a little disheveled. But he was so handsome that her heart skipped wildly, and she looked into his dark eyes with soft dreams in her own.
"You've got a bow on your pocket," she said in a voice that sounded too high-pitched to be her own.
"Of course I've got a bow on my pocket. I'm your damned Christmas present. Didn't you listen to your father? — Diana Palmer

Listen to me, maggots. Listen for your lives, for that's what it could mean some day. You never see all that you see. One of the things they send you to me for is to show you what you don't see in what you see
what you don't see when you're scared, or fighting or running or fucking. No man sees al that he sees, but before you're gunslinger
those of you who don't go west, that is,
you'll see more in one single glance than some men see in a lifetime. And some of what you don't see in that glance you'll see afterwards, in the eye of your memory
if you live long enough to remember, that is. Because the difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between the living and dying. — Stephen King

Shall I tell you what happened?' I asked. 'I died, and died without a sword in my hand, so I was sent to Hel and heard her dark cockerels crowing! They announced my coming, Leiknir, and the Corpse-Ripper came for me.' I took a pace towards him and he stepped back. 'The Corpse-Ripper, Leiknir, all rotted flesh peeling from his yellow bones and his eyes like fire and his teeth like horns and his claws like gelding knives. And there was a bone on the floor, a thigh bone, and I picked it up and I ripped it to a point with my own teeth and then I slew him.' I hefted Serpent-Breath. 'I am the dead, Leiknir, come to collect the living. Now kick your swords, spears, shields and helmets towards the door. — Bernard Cornwell

I think that the best kind of change, is the change that comes from the inside and begins it's way out until it emerges on the outside; a change that is born underneath then continues and spreads until it has reached the surface. That's a true change. A powerful change. And I have found that while we are emerging, changing into something glorious; it is actually us becoming who we really are. A water lily is born underneath the water, inside the soil at the bottom of the river or lake. And the water lily has always been a water lily for that whole time that it was sprouting out of the wet soil, reaching up through the dark water towards the sunlight, stretching and grasping for the surface; where it then buds and blooms on the outside in the sunshine. It doesn't bud and bloom on the surface and then try to reach down below into the soil. — C. JoyBell C.

The light from the moon shone along the door casing and spread across the walls a few inches inside, far enough for her to suddenly notice that the phases-of-the-moon wallpaper she'd been living with all week was gone. It was a now curious dark color she couldn't quite make out, punctuated by long strips of yellow. It looked almost like dark doors and windows opening, letting in light. The wallpaper was usually some reflection of her mood or situation, but what did this mean? Some new door was opening? Something was being set free? — Sarah Addison Allen

Eyes, golden-brown curls and crimson cheeks. She laughed too much to please her father's congregation and had shocked old Mrs. Taylor, the disconsolate spouse of several departed husbands, by saucily declaring - in the church-porch at that - "The world ISN'T a vale of tears, Mrs. Taylor. It's a world of laughter." Little dreamy Una was not given to laughter. Her braids of straight, dead-black hair betrayed no lawless kinks, and her almond-shaped, dark-blue eyes had something wistful and sorrowful in them. Her mouth had a trick of falling open over her tiny white teeth, and a shy, meditative smile occasionally crept over her small face. She was much more sensitive to public opinion than Faith, and had an uneasy consciousness that there was something askew in their way of living. She longed to put it right, but did not know how. Now and then she dusted the furniture - but it was so seldom she could find the duster because it was never in the same place twice. And when — L.M. Montgomery

I hope we find evidence of dark matter in the lab and in outer space. This would go a long way to proving the correctness of string theory, which is what I do for a living. That is my day job. So string theory is a potentially experimentally verifiable theory. — Michio Kaku

I admire Tolkien greatly. His books had enormous influence on me. And the trope that he sort of established - the idea of the Dark Lord and his Evil Minions - in the hands of lesser writers over the years and decades has not served the genre well. It has been beaten to death. The battle of good and evil is a great subject for any book and certainly for a fantasy book, but I think ultimately the battle between good and evil is weighed within the individual human heart and not necessarily between an army of people dressed in white and an army of people dressed in black. When I look at the world, I see that most real living breathing human beings are grey. — George R R Martin

A small hole in his shirt revealed a gooey red blob right in the meaty part above his armpit, blood pouring from the wound. It hurt. It hurt bad. If he'd thought his headache downstairs had been tough, this was like three or four of those, all smashed into a coil of pain right there in his shoulder. And spreading through the rest of his body.
Newt was at his side, looking down with worried eyes.
"He shot me." It just came out, a new number one on the list of the dumbest things he'd ever said. The pain, like living metal staples running through his insides, pricking and scratching with their little sharp points. He felt his mind going dark for the second time that day. — James Dashner

One morning indeed, I felt a sudden misgiving that she not only had left the house but had gone for good: I had just heard the sound of a door which seemed to me to be that of her room. On tiptoe I crept towards the room, opened the door, stood upon the threshold. In the dim light the bedclothes bulged in a semi-circle, that must be Albertine who, with her body bent, was sleeping with her feet and face to the wall. Only, overflowing the bed, the hair upon that head, abundant and dark, made me realise that it was she, that she had not opened her door, had not stirred, and I felt that this motionless and living semi-circle, in which a whole human life was contained and which was the only thing to which I attached any value, I felt that it was there, in my despotic possession. — Marcel Proust

A tree is made to live in peace in the color of day and in friendship with the sun, the wind and the rain. Its roots plunge in thefat fermentation of the soil, sucking in its elemental humors, its fortifying juices. Trees always seem lost in a great tranquil dream. The dark rising sap makes them groan in the warm afternoons. A tree is a living being that knows the course of the clouds and presses the storms because it is full of birds' nests. — Jacques Roumain

Lost in Static 18
And the storm is closing in now
Automatic 18 - Got to push through - Trapped in living hell
You're a prisoner of the dark sky
The propeller blades are still
And the evil eye of the hurricane's
Coming in now for the kill — Mike Oldfield

Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy. — Anne Carson

Dr. Lawrence Burton ... in fighting cancer.( Many of his patients are now living normal lives after being told there was nothing more the conventional treatments could do for them, and that death was imminent ... Why are Americans being forced to go off shore for treatment for cancer from an American doctor and for a program that was developed in America? — Larry McDonald

Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too. — Albert Camus

The only way to live life is to live in the present. You can't put things off thinking you'll have time later. There may not be a later. - Katarina Kozlov — Dannika Dark

THE WHISTLER
All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.
Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.
I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I've been living with
for thirty years?
This clear, dark, lovely whistler? — Mary Oliver

There is complete hope for terminal illness in the power of the Almighty God. The hands of Jesus are healing hands...the hands of Jesus are saving hands. Jesus brought peace and restoration, reconciliation, power, purpose, love, understading, purity and compatibility with him and the world we live in. we are healed through him. He mends brokenness and gives us back our lives which are stollen by the trials and suffering of this dark world. He is the light and life giving God. We ought to pray in our daily lives to receive from God, his help, upholding power and healing in the Name of Jesus Christ his one and only Son. When we ask from him...then we receive healing, relief from suffering, we stop living in fear of death. Read these books and experience the real presence of the supernatural, almighty sovereign and loving God. — Stellah Mupanduki

If you want to know what we are, look at the men reading books, searching in the dark pages of history for the lost word, the key to the mystery of the living peace. We are factory hands, field hands, mill hands, searching, building and molding structures. We are doctors, scientists, chemists discovering and eliminating disease, hunger and antagonism. We are soldiers, Navy men, citizens, guarding the imperishable dreams of our fathers to live in freedom. We are the living dream of dead men. We are the living spirit of free men. — Carlos Bulosan

Village life gently swirled around them, with the perpetual ebb and flow of people, scurrying in every direction. The village was a living, organic entity, with blood flowing through its veins, and with a definite pulse and heartbeat. It had its own distinct personality and its own dark caustic humour, and was constantly processing and regurgitating information through its winding, meandering streets. — Leonardo Donofrio

My fancies are fireflies Specks of living light twinkling in the dark. — Rabindranath Tagore

It was frightening, this new clarity of vision: but I felt free at last to know darkness as the other side of light, and that both were needed for sight.
And with that thought - it was almost as though I felt it in truth - the shackles of my old imprisoned self fell away at last. No more did I long for a warm bed behind safe walls. My heart drank in the beauty and wonder and danger of the world, and I saw for the first time that life was not something to survive, but something - the only thing - to be savoured in all its diversity. Light and dark together, mingled in all things, giving depth and substance where either alone was a pale shadow. I felt from that moment I might begin to find all things new. — Elizabeth Kerner

When it gets dark, it's only because god has tucked me in a cleft of the rock and covered me, protected, with His hand? In the pitch, I feel like I'm falling, sense the bridge giving way, God long absent. In the dark, the bridge and my world shakes, cracking dreams.
But maybe this is true reality: It is in the dark that God is passing by. the bridge and our lives shake not because God has abandoned, but the exact opposite: God is passing by. God is in the tremors. Dark is the holiest ground, the glory passing by. In the blackest, God is closest, at work, forging His perfect and right will. Though it is black and we can't see and our world seems to be free-falling and we feel utterly alone, Christ is most present to us, I-beam supporting in earthquake. — Ann Voskamp

Catatonic in the middle of the living room while — Dannika Dark

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire. — Walker Percy

I think of people as members of an audience. But an audience acts independently of every individual. It's an organism on its own. I focus on that living hydra in the dark. — Emo Philips

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

What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death. — Zane Grey

Certain living things prefer the dark, thriving in the shadows of tombstones and crypts, flowering admist the dead. Others tend toward the sun, blooming in the light, embracing the warmth. — Fiona Paul

Agnes Shay had the true spirit of a maid. Moistened with dishwater and mild eau de cologne, reared in narrow and sunless bedrooms, in back passages, back stairs, laundries, linen closets, and in those servants' halls that remind one of a prison, her soul had grown docile and bleak...Agnes loved the ceremonies of a big house. She drew the curtains in the living room at dark, lighted the candles on the table, and struck the dinner chimes like an eager altar boy. On fine evenings, when she sat on the back porch between the garbage pails and the woodbins, she liked to recall the faces of all the cooks she had known. It made her life seem rich. — John Cheever

Happiness comes from righteous living and the development of a noble character. You can observe this by noticing that people who are truly happy are honest, unselfish, kind, responsible and have a high moral standards. On the other hand, unhappy people are invariably selfish, lazy, irresponsible and lacking of self discipline. And people who are miserable tend to be immoral, dishonest, greedy, cruel, or in other ways dark in character. — Helen B. Andelin

This is what'll happen," she said, "and it's true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you've seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en't just nothing now; they're part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they've gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They'll never vanish. They're just part of everything. And that's exactly what'll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again. — Philip Pullman

Barlinnie Prison stands on dark and bloody ground. It is a temple of lost souls, and a place of living nightmares. It's been the breaker of many a man's dreams for more than a century. This prison works to a model of penitence with no pretence of rehabilitation. The criminal population that society has forsaken has filled this once, seemingly, bottomless pit to overflowing with their despair and nightmares of pain. More specifically, it is the battleground of an undeclared war that still ravages to this day, between the screws and the cons. The screws, backed by their authority, would use violence, but in return the prisoners would have to resort to their cunning, beguile, and the odd sudden act of violence. — Stephen Richards

At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark ... staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer. — Mark Haddon

May with its light behaving
Stirs vessel, eye and limb,
The singular and sad
Are willing to recover,
And to each swan-delighting river
The careless picnics come
In living white and red.

Our dead, remote and hooded,
In hollows rest, but we
From their vague woods have broken,
Forests where children meet
And the white angel-vampires flit,
Stand now with shaded eye,
The dangerous apple taken.

The real world lies before us,
Brave motions of the young,
Abundant wish for death,
The pleasing, pleasured, haunted:
A dying Master sinks tormented
In his admirers' ring,
The unjust walk the earth.

And love that makes impatient
Tortoise and roe, that lays
The blonde beside the dark,
Urges upon our blood,
Before the evil and the good
How insufficient is
Touch, endearment, look. — W. H. Auden

Marie-Laure sits in her customary spot in the corner of the kitchen, closest to the fireplace, and listens to the friends of Melanie Manec complain ... Nine of them sit around the square table, knees pressed to knees. Ration card restrictions, abysmal puddings, the deteriorating quality of fingernail varnish - these are crimes they feel in their souls. To hear so many of them in a room together confuses and excites Marie-Laure: they are giddy when they should be serious, somber after jokes; Madame Hebrard cries over the nonavailability of Demerara sugar, another woman's complaint about tobacco disintegrates mid sentence into hysterics about the phenomenal size of the perfumer's backside. They smell of stale bread, of stuffy living rooms crammed with dark titanic Breton furnishings. — Anthony Doerr

From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother's love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to "choose" not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. — Albert Camus

Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. — Jack Kerouac

But what I sincerely hope is that my life serves as a cautionary tale to the rich and poor alike; to anyone who's living with a spoon up their nose and a bunch of pills dissolving in their stomach sac; or to any person who's considering taking a God-given gift and misusing it; to anyone who decides to go to the dark side of the force and live a life of unbridled hedonism. And to anyone who thinks there's anything glamorous about being known as a Wolf of Wall Street. BOOK I — Jordan Belfort

It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear any mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages. — Jack London

My poor little child
Karin Boye
My poor child, so afraid of the dark,
who has met ghosts of another kind,
who always among those clad in white
glimpses those with evil faces,
now let me sing you gentle songs,
from fright they free, from force and cramp.
Of the evil they ask no repentance.
Of the good they ask not for battle.
See, you must know, that all that lives
is deep inside of equal kind.
Like trees and herbs it seeks to grow -
pulled forward by its inner laws.
And trees may fall and flowers wilt
and branches break, their power lost,
still the dream remains - awaits the call -
in every living drop of sap. (205) — Linda Olsson

All life will die, all mind will cease, and it will all be as if it had never happened. That, to be honest, is the goal to which evolution is traveling, that is the "benevolent" end of the furious living and furious dying ... All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again. The final result ... is to deprive it completely of meaning. — David Eagleman

Scientists and shamans alike know that all of life is woven into a web of infinite connections, contributing to the larger whole in a system that is complex beyond our imagining. When we sit quietly at the edge of a lake, or hike through a wildflower-strewn meadow, or walk through a cool, dark forest, we quickly become aware of our unity with the natural world. We fall back into natural rhythms--rhythms we are no longer in synch with as a result of living by the clock and spending much of our time in man-made spaces lit by electricity. Nature has a way of recalibrating us and helping us gain a new perspective on our stressors so that they seem less overwhelming. — Carl Greer

The foolish took their lamps, but took no oil (pursued ministry as their priority over getting oil). The wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps (pursued oil as their priority before ministry). At the dark midnight hour of history, the Spirit will raise up forerunners who cry out that Jesus is coming as a Bridegroom God and that we must go out to meet Him (make the necessary effort to encounter Him). They all slept which speaks of living in context to the natural processes of life. — Mike Bickle

Today I share about my addiction and recovery journey as often as possible because I don't want to die all alone in a dark closet, shrouded in shame beside the decomposing skeletons I tried so desperately to hide. I want to live. — Shannon Egan

Savannah shook her head and banged it against the heavy muscles of his chest. "I hate this, Gregori. I feel so useless. I feel like I'm endangering you. We are lifemates. I asked you to meet me halfway in my world, and you've done it. You've done everything I've asked of you. What have I done to live in your world with you?"
Gregori bent his dark head to the slim white column of her neck. "You are my world, ma petite, my very existence. You are what makes living bearable. You are my light, the very air I breathe." His mouth brushed her pulse, her earlobe. "You are not meant to walk in death. You never were. — Christine Feehan

LIFE IN ALEXANDRA was exhilarating and precarious. Its atmosphere was alive, its spirit adventurous, its people resourceful. Although the township did boast some handsome buildings, it could fairly be described as a slum, living testimony to the neglect of the authorities. The roads were unpaved and dirty, and filled with hungry, undernourished children scampering around half-naked. The air was thick with the smoke from coal fires in tin braziers and stoves. A single water tap served several houses. Pools of stinking, stagnant water full of maggots collected by the side of the road. Alexandra was known as "Dark City" for its complete absence of electricity. Walking home at night was perilous, for there were no lights, the silence pierced by yells, laughter, and occasional gunfire. So different from the darkness of the Transkei, which seemed to envelop one in a welcome embrace. — Nelson Mandela

But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures - trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest, and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? — Virginia Woolf

Ultimately, I see the Goddess as incorporating the full spectrum of existence, not just what we call 'the feminine.' The latter is actually a construct of a culture that divides existence into compartments, and in particular into the dualities with which we are so familiar: light/dark, female/male, mind/body, earth/spirit and so on.

The true nature of existence, including true human nature, I believe, is not so split. Acting and living from the integration of all these components is what I call spirituality. Thus, the Goddess represents a unity and wholeness which is the birthright and potential of every human being. All of us, all of existence, are the Divine. In order to complete this whole by bringing back that which has been denied, I name the Divine the Goddess. — Hallie Iglehart Auste

You can spend the rest of your life living in the past, or you can pull up your trousers and move on." "Is — Dannika Dark

To wake up on a gloriously bright morning, in a tent pitched beneath spruce trees, and to look out lazily and sleepily for a moment from the open side of the tent, across the dead camp-fire of the night before, to the river, where the light of morning rests and perhaps some early-rising[240] native is gliding in his birch canoe; to go to the river and freshen one's self with the cold water, and yell exultingly to the gulls and hell-divers, in the very joy of living; or to wake at night, when you have rolled in your blankets in the frost-stricken dying grass without a tent, and to look up through the leaves above to the dark sky and the flashing stars, and hear far off the call of a night bird or the howl of a wolf: this is the poetry, the joy of a wild and roving existence, which cannot come too often — Josiah Edward Spurr

Is it not possible that we are still living in the Dark Ages, still mocking the suggestion of 'mystical' forces that we cannot see or comprehend. — Dan Brown

The real danger is found in Humanity's refusal to move beyond the trap of instinct and into the intellectual mind. The refusal to accept our health and the health of every other living thing on this planet must always come before profit. Whether it's the oil companies, pharmaceutical companies; or anyone else; we are not Gods no matter how much the New Agers like to proclaim it. In that path lies the rubble of the enemy of life, his Fallen God Bombers and his murderous dark medics. Out of that emanates the force of fear; fear of judgement, fear of difference and fear the other will bring you pain. — Cole J. Davis

you gotta stop living in fear. You can't see the stars unless you go out in the dark. — Carian Cole

At last he said, "Did you come out of the big mountains?"
Gitano shook his head slowly. "No, I walked down the Salinas Valley."
The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. "Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?"
The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano's head. — John Steinbeck

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

And I couldn't take my eyes off Pete. He ate dinner like he always did, in three or four huge, whoofing bites, before heading back out front to his cone of warmth, his coffee, his cigarettes, and ghostly tunes piping from his little transistor radio. And most important, to whatever thoughts drowned out the voices of his own family saying "hello" and "happy holidays."
I watched him because I couldn't believe that could be anyone's comfortable horizon. A tiny porch on a dark corner near a highway. We lucked out living on a planet made thrilling by billions of years of chance, catastrophe, miracles, and disaster, and he'd rejected it. You're offered the world every morning when you open your eyes. I was beginning to see Pete as a representative of all the people who shut that out, through cynicism, religion, fear, greed, or ritual. — Patton Oswalt

The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times ... But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature. — Ferdinand Cohn

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. — Jack London

Holding on to the past is like groping in the dark room when you have the opportunity to turn on the light. You only stumble, fall and hurt yourself. — Wogu Donald

This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. — Willa Cather

TEN GUIDEPOSTS FOR WHOLEHEARTED LIVING 1. Cultivating authenticity: letting go of what people think 2. Cultivating self-compassion: letting go of perfectionism 3. Cultivating a resilient spirit: letting go of numbing and powerlessness 4. Cultivating gratitude and joy: letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark 5. Cultivating intuition and trusting faith: letting go of the need for certainty 6. Cultivating creativity: letting go of comparison 7. Cultivating play and rest: letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth 8. Cultivating calm and stillness: letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle 9. Cultivating meaningful work: letting go of self-doubt and "supposed to" 10. Cultivating laughter, song, and dance: letting go of being cool and "always in control — Brene Brown

It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet. — George W. Bush

He sat in the living room in the dark, an expert at waiting, a nineteen-year veteran of it, waiting for people who failed to appear, missed court dates because they forgot or didn't care, and took off. Nineteen years of losers, repeat offenders in and out of the system. Another one, that's all Louis was, slipping back into the life. — Elmore Leonard

When I finished bathing after dinner, Kumiko was sitting in the living room with the lights out. Hunched down in the dark with her gray shirt on, she looked like a piece of luggage that had been left in the wrong place. — Haruki Murakami

At the hill's foot Frodo found Aragorn, standing still and silent as a tree; but in his hand was a small golden bloom of elanor, and a light was in his eyes. He was wrapped in some fair memory: and as Frodo looked at him he knew that he beheld things as they had been in this same place. For the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord fall and fair; and he spoke words in the Elvish tongue to one whom Frodo could not see. Arwen vanimelda, namarie! He said, and then he drew a breath, and returning out of his thought he looked at Frodo and smiled.

'Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,' he said, 'and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me!' And taking Frodo's hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as a living man. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Once upon a time there were two cities within a city. One was light and one was dark. One moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones. And when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glade cemetery just across the way, which was the city of the dead. — Ray Bradbury

I picked up the butter-soft suede shirt and slacks and held them toward Martucci, but he bent over, grabbing at his stomach, and made it into the dark little cubicle in time to vomit into the toilet. He ran the small trickle of water in the sink over his hands, dabbed water on his face, then blotted himself on the rough paper towels. Within the next five minutes, he was dressed and deposited in the rear seat of my car between Haley and Finn. Vito, who had scared the living hell out of the hustler before giving him a kick in the ass out the hotel's side door, sat next to me as I drove. Vito was breathing heavily; it was the only sound in the car. — Dorothy Uhnak

It's very, very difficult because we're living in a world where they invent things in order to hide things from parents. There are these secret creator app guys who make things to intentionally do that, to keep your parents in the dark, and you've really got to work extra-hard to stay on top of it. — Christian Slater

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage ... Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. — Friedrich Hayek

That in the end, my sin will never outweigh God's love. That the Prodigal can never outrun the Father. That I am not measured by the good I do but by the grace I accept. That being lost is a prerequisite to being found. That living a life of faith is not lived in the light, it is discovered in the dark. That not being a saint here on earth will not necessarily keep you from being in that number when the march begins. — Brennan Manning

I feel like my job is to give hope. The world is in a dark place and we are living in somewhat of a nightmare. So I want to make films to give hope. — Hany Abu-Assad

I was living in a terrible time when people were being accused of being communists, and they attacked the movie industry, especially the writers. People couldn't work if they were on the blacklist. The studios banned them. It was the most onerous period in movie history. I don't think we have ever had a period so dark as that. — Kirk Douglas

When you slip down a mountain of Joy , don't Worry. Instead of living gloomily in the dark valley , look up at the next peak and take one step in that direction . — R.v.m.

If we'd found each other, though, the tormented, the weak and powerless, we couldn't bound together. What made me weak was the sense that I was alone. But maybe I wasn't alone. All the people on Through-the-Light, where were they? Living in dark space, the gray place. If we could've found each other sooner, would it have changed the outcome? — Julie Anne Peters

Modern man is full of platitudes about living life to its fullest, with catchy keychain phrases and little plaques for kitchen walls. But if you've never retreated to the solitude of a dark room and listened to Beethoven's Ninth from start to finish, you know nothing. For music is a transcendental exploration of human emotion and experience, the very fabric of life in its purest form. And the Ninth our greatest musical achievement. — Tiffany Madison

It occurred to me to look up and around at the stars in the clear sky, at the trees in the dark, at the half moon. I was missing them because I was caught in my head. I wasn't living right now. I was thinking to the future, to the past. I wasn't present. This is one of my greatest weaknesses, and one I have a greater realization of, only because I allowed some of my past to die so that my present could rush in to fill it. — Jennifer DeLucy

I can just hear Aaron saying that it's slight compared with the big topics they usually tackle."
"Slight!" I almost shouted. "Why is it that people always think bad, dark things are more real and important than things that lift you up and make you feel life is worth living? You ought to tell them that in a song. — Isobelle Carmody

Nothing can be as peaceful and endless as a long winter darkness, going on and on, like living in a tunnel where the dark sometimes deepens into night and sometimes eases to twilight, you're screened from everything, protected, even more alone than usual. — Tove Jansson

(As are all living things. All are caught in the river of power that is the Force, trapped by its currents. Only those who wield the dark side of the Force are capable of changing those currents; they are riverbreakers. They do not surrender to fate. They are its foes.) The — Chuck Wendig

Now see the nasturtiums. The leaves are like tiny green parasols blown inside-out and the flowers are terrifically garish. In every village we pass through, see how they are everywhere, how they fill every gap in every wall, every crack in every path.
The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival's just a matter of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down. Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing light-bulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower's plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season's out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life's eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself. — Sara Baume

I didn't think he'd go back for him. But it shouldn't surprise me, either, I guess ... given their relationship. I'm extremely curious where they're hiding him, as he doesn't blend. At all. Ever. I can't imagine where they could put him that he wouldn't attract a lot of attention ... in either form." Xev
"Well, aren't we Mr. Dark and Cryptic ... shall we call him?" Nick pulls out his phone.
"I doubt he knows how to work that. I'm sure he'd sniff it and eat it if you gave him one. Do you know where they're keeping him?" Xev
"You know how akri-Caleb's house is up off the ground and gots all that room under it for storage?" Simi
"Oh dear Gods, he's in my wine cellar? Seriously? I'm thinking I should have made amends with my brother sooner and moved him into my house to watch the puca. What kind of mutant life form do I have living in my cellar? And do I need to fumigate my house?"" Caleb — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Create space in your mind for the harsh memories too. Don't ever cower from a teacher. Learn and live higher because you know how to use those dark memories as stepping-stones to think your way to a higher form of living. — Toni Sorenson

Darkness cannot survive in light, but a light can shine in the dark! — Odille Rault

I can't muster a smile. Even with the knowledge that it's dark outside and light up here, it's hard to believe that he can see us. We should be invisible. We are so alone. Mabel and I are standing side by side, but we can't even see each other. In the distance are the lights of town. People must be finishing their workdays, picking up their kids, figuring out dinner. They're talking to one another in easy voices about things of great significance and things that don't mean much. The distance between us and all of that living feels insurmountable. — Nina LaCour