Mornings Are Like Quotes & Sayings

there have been mornings
so quiet and tender
like a poem, on Thursday's lips
that I wondered
if I'd been kissed at all... — Sanober Khan

That night I dreamed about flying turtles and forest fires and fucking the earth ... The next morning I awoke and I listened to the tree company tearing away the woods and the timber. I heard the chainsaws ripping outside my open window and I heard the dynamite exploding all the mountain tops away for the black rock below. And instead of feeling sad like I did most mornings, I felt something else now. I found myself saying, 'Explode. Explode you mountains. Rip them down you fuckers. Take this stinking dirt and leave this land with hatred and death. — Scott McClanahan

The morning interviews were always the hardest, hung-over, trying to get the beer down. No, I have no idea why I am a writer. No, my writing has no particular meaning that I know of. Celine? Oh sure. Why not? Do I like women? Well, I'd rather fuck most of them than live with them. What do I think is important? Good wine, good plumbing and to be able to sleep late in the mornings. Are you really disturbing me? Of course you are. Do you expect me to start lying at the age of 58? Buy me a drink. — Charles Bukowski

nerves


twitching in the sheets --
to face the sunlight again,
that's clearly
trouble.
I like the city better when the
neon lights are going and
the nudies dance on top of the
bar
to the mauling music.

I'm under this sheet
thinking.
me nerves are hampered by
history --
the most memorable concern of mankind
is the guys it takes to
face the sunlight again.

love begins at the meeting of two
strangers. love for the world is
impossible. I'd rather stay in bed
and sleep.

dizzied by the days and the streets and the years
I pull the sheets to my neck.
I turn my ass to the wall.
I hate the mornings more than
any man. — Charles Bukowski

Some mornings,
it's hard to get
out of bed.
Sleep lures you
like a stranger
with a piece of candy.
Follow me.
It will be okay.
I promise.
You know better,
but still you follow,
because you really do
love candy. — Lisa Schroeder

I like mornings because each day is like another chance. — Carrie Arcos

The sheep stampeded away because sheep are smart enough not to trust anyone for anything, especially not people who sleep in and crawl out of sheds, and I couldn't disagree with those sheep because I would run away from me, too, if I was a sheep and not me and even if I was me, I'd still like, some mornings, to be the thing running far from me instead of sewn inside myself forever. — Catherine Lacey

As a child I'd longed for Thomas Stone or at least the idea of him. So many mornings I waited for him at the gates of Missing. I saw that vigil now as necessary, a prerequisite for my insides to harden and cure just like the willow of a cricket bat must cure to be ready for a lifetime of knocks. That was the lesson at Missing's gates: the world does not owe you and neither does your father. — Abraham Verghese

Little Life Lesson 1: Life is a lot like hair, some mornings you get up and it looks great. Other mornings you can tell it's out to get you. — Michele Jaffe

Carve out the time. Notice I do not say find the time. That is an absurd and dangerous phrase. Time is never lying around waiting for us to find her. She is elusive. She wants you to sculpt her like clay, to mold her into exactly the form you desire your days to take. If you refuse to do that, if you spend your mornings worrying and your afternoons catering to others, always hoping there will be a few minutes left for you, time will play you like a sucker, making you run harder and faster with each passing week. Time wants you to realize that she is the most precious and irreducible fact in your live. Make her into what you will — Jennifer Louden

I consider myself a kind of a nerd, because when we go to the coffee shop in the mornings, we sit there in a very neat row with our laptops. It's just like being at work, but with coffee and panini. And, of course, you don't get paid. — Christopher Fowler

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself. — Robert Hass

He loved the way she smelled in the mornings; he liked to sniff at her shoulders or her throat. — Larry McMurtry

Coffee, she'd discovered, was tied to all sorts of memories, different for each person. Sunday mornings, friendly get-togethers, a favorite grandfather long since gone, the AA meeting that saved their life. Coffee meant something to people. Most found their lives were miserable without it. Coffee was a lot like love that way. And because Rachel believed in love, she believed in coffee, too. — Sarah Addison Allen

There was our old life, in the apartment, in which we had time to finish most of the tasks we started and took long showers and remembered to water our plants. And there was our new life, in the hospital a mile away, in which Shauna needed morphine and two babies needed to eat every three hours around the clock ... I remember thinking, we're going to have to figure out how to combine our old life with our new life ... Over a year later, we still have days of mind-crushing fatigue, midnights when I think I'm pouring milk into a bottle but am actually pouring it all over the counter. Yesterday I spent five minutes trying to remember my parents' zip code. But now there are mornings like this one, when we wake up and realize we've slept through the entire night, and we stroll through the gardens as if we are normal again, as if we are finally learning the syllables of this strange, new language. — Anthony Doerr

She walked quickly around her one-room apartment. After more than four years in this one home she knew all its possibilities, how it could put on a sham appearance of warmth and welcome when she needed a place to hide in, how it stood over her in the night when she woke suddenly, how it could relax itself into a disagreeable unmade, badly-put-together state, mornings like this, anxious to drive her out and go back to sleep. — Shirley Jackson

But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secretthat
some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else's smile; that she was
standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and
attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real ... and who, when
you got right down to it, didn't want to remember, because it hurt even more than this. — Jodi Picoult

This notion of rest, it's attractive to her, but I don't think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn't like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor mornings free of flies and heat when the light is shy. No. Not at all. They fill their mind and hands with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don't know where from. — Toni Morrison

His elbows cracked loudly when he straightened his arms, and something hitched and snapped in his right shoulder when he moved it the wrong way; a general stiffness of his frame worked itself out by halves through most mornings, and he labored like an engine through the afternoons, but he was well past thirty-five years, closer now to forty, and he really wasn't much good in the woods anymore. — Denis Johnson

but here I am, in this study that looks across a road well travelled in the rushing mornings to work, and hardly travelled with such anxiety and intent during the hours that come before the rush to work, walked on, and peed on, by the homeless, and the prostitutes and the pimps, and the men and women going home to apartments in the sky, surrounding and overlooking Moss Park park, as I like to call it. Moss Park park is where life stretches out itself on its back, prostrate in filthy, hopeless, bouts of heroism and stardom, for these men who lie on the benches and the dying grass, are heroes to themselves and to one another, — Austin Clarke

At times one wanders, doubting the facts, even when one has discovered the secrets of the good life. To be sure, my solution is not the ideal.
But when you don't like your own life, when you know that you must change lives, you don't have any choice, do you? What can one do to become
another?Impossible. One would have to cease being anyone, forget oneself for someone else, at least once.But how? Don't bear down too hard on me.
I am like that old beggar who wouldn't let go of my hand one day on a cafe terrace: Oh, sir,he said, its not just that I am no good, but you lose
track of the light.Yes, we have lost track of the light, the mornings, the holy innocence of those who forgive themselves. — Albert Camus

The forno in Cortona bakes a crusty bread in their wood oven, a perfect toast. Breakfast is one of my favorite times because the mornings are so fresh, with no hint of the heat to come. I get up early and take my toast and coffee out on the terrace for an hour with a book and the green-black rows of cypresses against the soft sky, the hills pleated with olive terraces that haven't changed since the seasons were depicted in medieval psalters. Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. — Anonymous

'Monday Mornings' is so utterly different - in so many ways - from anything else I've done, really. I also desperately wanted an ensemble piece, but I couldn't have dreamed of being a part of something like this. I am so lucky. — Jennifer Finnigan

Some Saturday mornings, as soon as the mountains had bottled up the last cheerful sound of Bob and the truck, I, feeling like a cross between a boll weevil and a slut, took a large cup of hot coffee, a hot-water bottle, a cigarette and a magazine and WENT BACK TO BED. Then, from six-thirty until nine or so, I luxuriated in breaking the old mountain tradition that a decent woman is in bed only between the hours of seven pm and four am unless she is in labor or dead. — Betty MacDonald

Preaching on Sunday mornings is such a simple thing, and by complicating it, I think we all do ourselves and the audience a disservice. It is very simple. Here is the model: Make people feel like they need an answer to a question. — Andy Stanley

When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender, of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries. — Kenneth Grahame

There are mornings on this road trip as the early light gathers itself, something quite unexpected happens. My camera pushes me aside and takes on a life of it's own, conspiring with nature and becoming a veritable paintbrush. I'd like to take credit for the end result, but I know it would be a lie. — Stephen Braxton Thompson

Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things
sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in the mountains ... Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited. — John Graves

No more junk talk, no more lies. No more mornings in the hospital getting bad blood drained out of me. No more doctors trying to analyse what makes me a drug addict. No more futile attempts at trying to control my heroin use. No more defending myself when I know I am practically indefensible. No more police using me as practice. No more ODs, no more losses. No more trying to take an intellectual position on my heroin addiction when it takes more than it gives. No more dope-sick mornings, no more slow suicide, no more pain without end.
No more AA. No more NA. No more mind control. No more being a victim, no more looking for reasons in childhood, in God in anything but what exists in HERE. No more admitting I am powerless.
Down the dusty Los Angeles sidewalks, down the urine stained London back alleys ... there goes the connection fading into the crowd like a 1960's Polaroid.
"Business ... ?"
"Whachoo need ... ?"
"Chiva ... ? — Tony O'Neill

Sometimes I do wake up in the mornings and feel like I've just had the most incredible dream. I've just dreamt my life — Richard Branson

Let anyone using those weasel words "freedom of worship" know, they have "freedom of worship" in China and it is meaningless and it is vile. "Freedom of worship" says you may do what you like in that building on Sunday mornings or whenever you like, but when you come out you will bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state. That is the antithesis of what the Founders meant in guaranteeing "freedom of religion. — Eric Metaxas

It was one of those bitter mornings when the whole of nature is shiny, brittle, and hard, like crystal. The trees, decked out in frost, seem to have sweated ice; the earth resounds beneath one's feet; the tiniest sounds carry a long way in the dry air; the blue sky is bright as a mirror, and the sun moves through space in icy brilliance, casting on the frozen world rays which bestow no warmth upon anything. — Guy De Maupassant

You're not used to early mornings, are you?"
He shook his head. "Early mornings were invented by the system to keep the people occupied. But not me. I'm on to them. They're not gonna catch me napping. Metaphorically, like. Obviously, they can catch me physically napping like, four or five times a day, but, metaphorically, I am so far beyond their reach. — Derek Landy

There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience. — Paul Bowles

I still don't know a place with lovelier Aprils. The mornings and nights are fresh and cool, and the sun pours down like spilled honey, warm without the thick wet weight of the coming summer. The damp earth is as red as flesh, or blood, and so fecund that you can almost hear the thrumming, rustling push of growth up through it. The new foliage is a thousand different shades of pink, red, gold, and green. I could not seem to stay indoors at night in that first spring; I was enraptured with the startling, ghostly white showfalls of dogwood in dusk-green woods, and with streetlights shining through new leaves. Azaleas rolled like surf through the wooded hills of the northwest. — Anne Rivers Siddons

My writing day follows my family's day. I get a good few hours in the mornings when the kids are out of the house. And I don't work at night any more. I like to see my family. — Chang-rae Lee

English autumn mornings are often like mornings nowhere else in the world.
The air is cold.
The floorboards are cold.
It is perhaps this coldness which sharpens the tang of the hot cup of tea. Outside, steps on the gravel crunch a little more loudly than a month ago because of the very slight frost — John Berger

Nine-year-old Laila rose from bed, as she did most mornings, hungry for the sight of her friend Tariq. This morning, however, she knew there would be no Tariq sighting.
- How long will you be gone? - She'd asked when Tariq had told her that his parents were
taking him south, to the city of Ghazni, to visit his paternal uncle.
- Thirteen days
- Thirteen days?
- It's not so long. You're making a face, Laila.
- I am not.
- You're not going to cry, are you?
- I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.
She'd kicked at his shin, not his artificial but his real one, and he'd playfully whacked
the back of her head.
Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, Laila had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which Tariq's father sometimes played old Pashto songs, time stretched and contracted depending on Tariq's absence or presence. — Khaled Hosseini

It seems wrong and unfair that Christmas, with its stressful and unmanageable financial and emotional challenges, should first be forced upon one wholly against one's will, then rudely snatched away just when one is starting to get into it. Was really beginning to enjoy the feeling that normal service was suspended and it was OK to lie in bed as long as you want, put anything you fancy into your mouth, and drink alcohol whenever it should chance to pass your way, even in the mornings. Now suddenly we are all supposed to snap into self-discipline like lean teenage greyhounds. — Helen Fielding

But something is going to happen, that's for sure. It depends on how bold we choose to be. We could get out, maybe, or we could die, or we could be badly injured going over a waterfall and end up on a gravel beach only to be found by a young boy who would carve messages in their toes and shove us back out to sea. There are lots of possibilities, and I am happy with all of them."

"Do you like mornings?" Tom asked, leaning on his elbow.

"Not usually," Reg said. "I'm typically rather sullen over my breakfast, and I'm sure the crawdads notice. But what is truly strange is that I never liked mornings when I could have them with real sunrises and real dew on roses and real paperboys wrecking real bicycles on the sidewalk outside my window. How I ever could have remained asleep and voluntarily missed a sunrise, I can't explain. If you're right and we get out, I don't think I'll miss another one. — N.D. Wilson

It was still late summer elsewhere, but here, high in Appalachia, fall was coming; for the last three mornings, she'd been able to see her breath.
The woods, which started twenty feet back from her backdoor like a solid wall, showed only hints of the impending autumn. A few leaves near the treetops had turned, but most were full and green. Visible in the distance, the Widow's Tree towered above the forest. Its leaves were the most stubborn, tenaciously holding on sometimes until spring if the winter was mild. It was a transitional period, when the world changed its cycle and opened a window during which people might also change, if they had the inclination. — Alex Bledsoe

God, the three of you.
When I wake up on Saturday mornings
late you always let me sleep in
I come looking for you, and you're in the backyard with dirt on your knees and two little girls spinning around you in perfect orbit. And you put their hair in pigtails, and you let them wear whatever madness they want, and Alice planted a fruit cocktail tree, and Noomi ate a butterfly, and they look like me because they're round and golden, but the glow for you.
And you built us a picnic table.
And you learned to bake bread.
And you've painted a mural on ever west-facing wall.
And it isn't all bad, I promise. I swear to you.
You might not be actively, thoughtfully happy 70 to 80 percent of the time, but maybe you wouldn't be anyway. And even when you're sad, Neal
even when you're falling asleep at the other side of the bed
I think you're happy, too. About some things. About a few things. — Rainbow Rowell

It smelled like heaven, like love, like home and family and Sunday mornings at her grandparents' house. It smelled like...Bacon. — Tiffany Reisz

The cold mornings open their eyes to glare at you one after another, like hostile strangers. — Anna Kavan

There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road. — Joanna Newsom

Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only. — Haruki Murakami

Mornings are like almost clean slates. I say almost clean because the residue of yesterdays is sometimes stuck on them. — Medeia Sharif

Great tracts of reindeer moss, for example: tiny stars and florets and inklings of an ancient flora growing on exhausted land. Crisp underfoot in summer, the stuff is like a patch of the arctic fallen into the world in the wrong place. Everywhere, there are bony shoulders and blades of flint. On wet mornings you can pick up shards knocked from flint cores by Neolithic craftsmen, tiny flakes of stone glowing in thin coats of cold water. — Helen Macdonald

If you do not like to see me naked, Madam, I suggest you get a different bus in the mornings! — Ade Bozzay

Our mornings were never "rise and shine." They were "rise and fight." They were loud and ravaging. They were heavy and unnerving, like the after-math of a war, with unresolved territorial disputes.
They were never serene, but they were beautiful. More beautiful than the smile you wear when you step out of the shower, more tempting than the sight of you brewing coffee from across the kitchen bar, more promising than a glorious victory, bigger than all our tumultuous past. Bigger than you. Bigger than I. — Malak El Halabi

Thinking about him requires so little effort that she can do it while performing mindless activities. Soaping the dishes, replaiting Clare Kelley's hair, drying the dishes. The part of her brain that plays his ongoing reel is unconnected to the neurons and synapses that control things like conscious thought and logic. Ben turning to her at a party. Ben turning to her. Ben turning. What human being deserves to be the nucleus of such high esteem? Certainly not Benjamin, middle name Hal, last name Allen. Five-nine in boots. Who has a car that doesn't start on cold mornings, an unfinished screenplay, a law degree he doesn't use, a romantic's tendency to save movie stubs, and a mannered, unsmiling wife. — Marie-Helene Bertino

The city lies at the galaxy's dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel. — Yoon Ha Lee

I like misty autumn mornings,
and cold snowy winter nights.
Rainstorms bring me innerpeace,
thunder sets my soul alight.

I care not for summer,
days too long, the heavy heat.
Give me candlelight evenings,
early darkness, a silent street. — N.C.

In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn't fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It's like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience. — Padma Lakshmi

I was often looked at as a leper by kids at school because I was a Jehovah's Witness. They didn't like it - you were 'weird'. And on Saturday mornings, you'd be knocking at their doors. I remember standing there with my mum and dad, thinking, 'Oh my God, I know whose door this is, and I'll have to see them on Monday.' It was terrible. — Luke Evans

I have caught my reflection and thought, 'Oof. That girl is struggling. That girl is tired.' I've had mornings where I'm like, 'Oh God, I have weird hair.' — Melissa McCarthy

Mornings are cool like a spy,
cool like a rebel,
cool like a rhetorical street fighter,
cool like an unfilled spot where wit and joy once stood,
cool like the man who can make productive use of his demons,
cool like the deciphered eccentricities of good friends,
cool like the later protest-and-psychedelic era. — Brian D'Ambrosio

I will, I do, Amen, Here Here, Let's
eat, drink and be merry. Marriage is
the public spectacle of private
parts:
cheque-books and genitals, house-wares, fainthearts,
all doubts becalmed by kissing
aunt, a priest's
safe homily, those tinkling glasses
tightening those ties that truly bind
us together forever, dressed to the nines.

Darling, I reckon maybe thirty years,
given our ages and expectancies.
Barring the tragic or untimely, say,
ten thousand mornings, ten thousand evenings,
please God, ten thousand moistened nights like this,
when, mindless of these vows, our opposites,
nonetheless, attract. Thus, love's subtactraction:
the timeless from the ordinary times --
nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. — Thomas Lynch

You know I love to spend my mornings, like sunlight dancing on your skin — Rodney Crowell

I'll tell them how I survive it. I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in things because I'm afraid it could be taken away. That's when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I've seen someone do. It's like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years.
But there are much worse games to play. — Suzanne Collins

It sounded so promising. As if this would be the day. The day to ride a bike without training wheels. To make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding. To persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly. — Anna Quindlen

If she has given you children remind yourself every day of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth words in this sentence. If you hurt her in ways that are irreparable I will send out people to hurt you back, sorry, but it has to be like that. Yes, you may have had a difficult childhood, but please allow me to introduce myself: Hello, I am the woman who doesn't give a shit. Make her something warm to drink in the mornings and give her time to begin speaking; only rush at her with an embrace or a gemstone. Wildflowers. A love note. Yeats. — Mary-Louise Parker

Every August, I go away for four weeks to a place in Michigan. I work in the mornings, spend the month in shorts and flip-flops. It gives me time to think like an investor and come back in September for some heavy planning. — Joe Mansueto

Sometimes I feel like I'm on top of the world, and other mornings I feel like crap. — Victoria Chang

On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his
trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of
every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred per cent, three hundred
per cent, or five hundred per cent, as the case might be. The animals saw
no reason to disbelieve him, especially as they could no longer remember very
clearly what conditions had been like before the Rebellion. All the same, there
were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more
food. — George Orwell

With Dante gone, time seemed to stand still around me; the mornings just as cloudy and dark as the evenings, as if the sun had never decided to rise. There was no wind, like the world was holding its breath along with me, waiting for him to return. — Yvonne Woon

My mornings go by so fast I forget breakfast. Lunch - that's turned out to be my biggest meal. I like tuna fish with low-fat mayonnaise and celery, egg whites and garlic. It's delish. — Jackee Harry

I'm a bit hesitant to do anything because I'm actually kind of lazy and I'd like an easier life from now on. The world's a massive place with lots of early mornings and late starts when you're working. — Robbie Williams

He finished his drink. 'I don't like mornings either,' he said. That's why I'm a writer. — Dorothy B. Hughes

There was nothing wrong with having an expensive home, nothing wrong at all. There's a pride in building something up, working hard to achieve something. But it shouldn't have been his manhood that increased with each new success, it should have been his heart. His success was like the witch in 'Hansel and Gretel' fairy tale: it fed him for all the wrong reasons, fattening him in all the wrong places. Dad deserved his success, he just needed a masterclass in humility. I could have done with one too. How special I thought I was in the silver Aston Martin in which he drove me to school some mornings. How special am I now, now that somebody bought it from a depot of reprocessed cars, for a fraction of the price. How special indeed — Cecelia Ahern

Salvage what you can so you don't end up like me; bitter and hateful but disguising it with a smile, and then hide it away under the cover of wild nights and very early mornings. — J.C. Wickhart

Sometimes, Gansey forgot how much he liked school and how good he was at it. But he couldn't forget it on mornings like this one - fall fog rising out of the fields and lifting in front of the mountains, the Pig running cool and loud, Ronan climbing out of the passenger seat and knocking knuckles on the roof with teeth flashing, dewy grass misting the black toes of his shoes, bag slung over his blazer, narrow-eyed Adam bumping fists as they met on the sidewalk, boys around them laughing and calling to one another, making space for the three of them because this had been a thing for so long: Gansey-Lynch-Parrish. — Maggie Stiefvater

Mornings like this one were made for memories. — Maggie Stiefvater

In this country people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure. Believe me, it is the mornings that determine a man's character. — Milan Kundera

You told me mornings were the best time to break your own heart. So here I am, smoking your brand of cigarettes for the scent. I wonder if you still sing Beatles songs as you make coffee. You said your mother used to sing them to you when you couldn't sleep, nineteen years before we met, twenty before you moved your clothes out of our closet while I was at work. By the way, I hate you for leaving all the photographs on the fridge. Taking them down felt like peeling off new scabs, like slapping a sunburn. I spent so many nights carving your body into pillows, I can promise you nothing feels like sleeping with your arm around me and your breath in my ear. Still, it's comforting to know we sleep under the same moon, even if she's so much older when she gets to me. I like to imagine she's seen you sleeping and wants me to know you're doing well. — Clementine Von Radics

Before David McCullough went on to fame, fortune, and literary awards with books like John Adams and Mornings on Horseback, he wrote a tragic and riveting account of the great 1889 flood in Pennsylvania, The Johnstown Flood. Kathleen Cambor describes the same disaster in a novel, In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden. — Nancy Pearl

I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.
We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment. — J.M. Coetzee

I'm no atheist - I'm lazy. I really do like hassle-free Sunday mornings. I have a problem with organized religion, so I've simply opted out. Live and let live, I figure. — Lynn Coady

On winter mornings when it's dark and the air is crisp, the lights are still shining and the first customers are gathered at the counter like conspirators. They give you the illusion that the day will be a new adventure. And that illusion stats with you for at least some of the morning. — Patrick Modiano

It's the worst yet. I'm in TEFL City.'

'TEFL City' because we called those times 'TEFL-pondering mornings', when your only option felt like emigration and teaching. — Emma Jane Unsworth

I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I wrote these letters in the mornings before work, in the library, during my sessions of prolonged loitering in Commons, where I remained every evening until asked to leave by the janitor. It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation overheard, I felt the old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in my life, ever. — Donna Tartt

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. — Lionel Shriver

He takes the view that mornings happen to other people. I think I once saw him at breakfast, although possibly it was just someone who looked a bit like him who was lying with their head in the plate of baked beans. He likes good sushi, and quite likes people, too, although not raw; he is kind to fans who are not total jerks, and enjoys talking to people who know how to talk. He doesn't look as though he's forty; that may have happened to someone else, too. Or perhaps there's special picture locked in his attic. — Terry Pratchett

Some mornings, she'd wake and vow, Today, I will get it right. I won't be such an awful mess of a girl. I won't lose my temper or make unkind remarks. I won't go too far with a joke and feel the room go quiet with disapproval. I'll be good and kind and sensible and patient. The sort everyone loves. But by evening, her good intentions would have unraveled. She'd say the wrong thing or talk a little too loudly. She'd take a dare she shouldn't, just to be noticed. Perhaps Mabel was right, and she was selfish. But what was the point of living so quietly you made no noise at all? "Oh, Evie, you're too much," people said, and it wasn't complimentary. Yes, she was too much. She felt like too much inside all the time. So why wasn't she ever enough? — Libba Bray

For we must not dwell on Death, as it is a mystery and it is something Unknown we leave to the Lord and his disposing for if we knew everything we would be too full of perfectly known things, and thus never rested nor content but driven with busyness and stuffed full. When I rode out in the early mornings in summertimes everything appeared to me, one after the other, in its own selfe without having to be known about beforehand, before you even get to it. In the order of the world is a deep pattern. You can't know if beforehand. If you did you would remain forever unsurprised and dwarfed and hardened. In the early mornings one after another we broke up the planes of water in the pools of Beaverdam with slow steps, horse and rider, and the trees appeared in their reflections like underwater spirits of themselves. Before these things a person is silent. — Paulette Jiles