Night Chill Quotes & Sayings

in spite of the cold, this ash tree does not shy
from shrugging off its coat, sloping its nude
shoulders to the night. So, you said, undo,
unbutton, unclasp, slowly remove. Let down your
hair, breathe out. Stand stark in this room until
we remember how not to feel the chill. — Ruby Robinson

In this crooked blind alley, as the chill descends,
they feed fires
with logs of song and poetry.
Hazard not a thought:
These are strange times, my dear.

The man who knocks at your door in the noon of the night
has come to kill the light.
Let's hide light in the larder. — Ahmad Shamlu

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows ... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul. — Fernando Pessoa

Followed her out the door and watched her walk down the road towards home, hers, and the bright yard light, and her own bed, and our parents, and I stood there for a long time because I didn't know where else to go.
I stood there long enough to feel the chill of the night. The sky was a blanket of stars.Indifferent.
I repeated the ancient song of Nezahualcoytl. I stood there long enough to hear my family singing. Why were they singing at two in the morning? I heard the hight, creaky voice of my mother and the off-key but persistent voices of my little brothers. — Miriam Toews

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons - the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown. — H.P. Lovecraft

O LAKE OF LIGHT" Risen from the milky sward I saw the one I love with flower And on her breast an unborn moon O wondrous moon! O lake of light! The grass so green is turning white O moon, O wondrous lake of light! Milk of fire upon her tongue Drew birds of jade and betel gum Run river run! The world of late grown small Now achieves its just dimension The one I love grown big with flower Wheels within the lunar hour Birds of jade in milky fire Mitigate the heart's desire Then run, river, run, as runs the sun For none are born except the one That lies upon the breast undone The moon unborn is chill as night The heart is like a lake of light Flower, moon, milk of fire These together do conspire Take wing, strange birds, take wing! - Henry Miller — Arthur Hoyle

But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air. — Donna Tartt

Then the sun came up and shook the night chill out of the air the way you'd shake a rug. — John Steinbeck

Taylor clapped her hands three times for attention. Ladies! Ladies! My stars! That's enough. Now. We all know Miss Arkansas's girls are fake, miss Ohio's easier than making cereal, and Miss Montana's dress is something my blind meemaw would wear to bingo night. And Miss New Mexico
aren't you from the chill-out state? Maybe you can channel up some new-age-Whole-Foods-incense calm right about now, because we have a big job ahead called staying alive. — Libba Bray

Undertow"
"I set out one night
When the tide was low
There were signs in the sky
But I did not know
I'd be caught in the grip
Of the undertow
Ditched on a beach
Where the sea hates to go
With a child in my arms
And a chill in my soul
And my heart the shape
Of a begging bowl — Leonard Cohen

As little flowers, which the chill of night has bent and huddled, when the white sun strikes, grow straight and open fully on their stems, so did I, too, with my exhausted force. — Dante Alighieri

As he crossed Grattan Bridge he looked down the river towards the lower quays and pitied the poor stunted houses. They seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled together along the riverbanks, their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night bid them arise, shake themselves and begone. — James Joyce

It was too quiet for hope, and then too loud for safety.

She thought of the people she had lost, of the affection, the smiles, the belonging she could never again take for granted. It was the end of a life, and as she stood there, shivering in the brief night-time chill, it dawned on her that it was the end of her childhood. — Radhika Swarup

Henry's Understanding
He was reading late, at Richard's, down in Maine,
aged 32? Richard & Helen long in bed,
my good wife long in bed.
All I had to do was strip & get into my bed,
putting the marker in the book, & sleep,
& wake to a hot breakfast.
Off the coast was an island, P'tit Manaan,
the bluff from Richard's lawn was almost sheer.
A chill at four o'clock.
It only takes a few minutes to make a man.
A concentration upon now & here.
Suddenly, unlike Bach,
& horribly, unlike Bach, it occurred to me
that one night, instead of warm pajamas,
I'd take off all my clothes
& cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff
into the terrible water & walk forever
under it out toward the island. — John Berryman

The wind's on the wold And the night is a-cold, And Thames runs chill Twixt mead and hill, But kind and dear Is the old house here, And my heart is warm Midst winter's harm ... — Bill Bryson

It is as if the moon and the trees have switched places. The sky is plunged into the heavy cloud-lidded darkness that seems to come every night, but in the valley below, the trees - or the places between the trees, it is impossible to tell the source - are fully lit, glowing. The woods are alight like an ember, bluish white and cradled by the rolling hills. It's like a beacon, I think with a chill. So this is what happens when the world goes black. The forest steals the light from the sky. Cole straightens beside me, taking ragged breaths. I cannot stop staring at the glowing trees. It is strange and magical. Almost lovely. The wind song has become simply a song, clear and articulate, as if made by an instrument instead of the air. It is all a perfect dream. — Victoria Schwab

I loved wintertime in Kabul. I loved it for the soft pattering of snow against
my window at night, for the way fresh snow crunched under my black rubber boots,
for the warmth of the cast-iron stove as the wind screeched through the yards,
the streets. But mostly because, as the trees froze and ice sheathed the roads,
the chill between Baba and me thawed a little. And the reason for that was the
kites. Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of
existence. Kites were the one paper thin slice of intersection between those
spheres. — Khaled Hosseini

After all these years, his best friend is malaria.
Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles. — Louis Bayard

In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air.
At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land.
Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home. — Patricia McCormick

Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and smutted[9] first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of raw fish. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Or I would be the rain itself, wreathing over the island, mingling in the quiet of moist places, filling its pores with its saturated breaths. And I would be the wind, whispering through the tangled woods, running airy fingers over the island's face, tingling in the chill of concealed places, sighing secrets in the dawn. And I would be the light, flinging over the island, covering it with flash and shadow, shining on rocks and pools, softening to a touch in the glow of dusk. If I were the rain and wind and light, I would encircle the island like the sky surrounding earth, flood through it like a heart driven pulse, shine from inside it like a star in flames, burn away to blackness in the closed eyes of its night. There are so many ways I could love this island, if I were the rain. — Richard Nelson

In the evening, the summer haze hovers over the fields like a translucent amber blanket waiting to put the crops to bed, tucking them in sweetly before the chill of the night descends over all. The locusts buzz in the distance and the mosquitoes gather around the porch lights as we play cards and sip lemonade. It's muggy, but a comfortable kind of humid, like natures hug on your sun-kissed skin. — Sky Ashton

I woke sometime in the middle of the night and lay in the hammock, wriggled my foot out of the sleeping bag into the chill and found the rough ground with my bare foot and rocked myself back and forth. And watched the stars swim against the mesh of leaves. Like a fish nosing a net.
This is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears. — Peter Heller

Your name is a -- bird in my hand
a piece of -- ice on the tongue
one single movement of the lips.
Your name is: five signs,
a ball caught in flight, a
silver bell in the mouth

a stone, cast in a quiet pool
makes the splash of your name, and
the sound is in the clatter of
night hooves, loud as a thunderclap
or it speaks straight into my forehead,
shrill as the click of a cocked gun.

Your name -- how impossible, it
is a kiss in the eyes on
motionless eyelashes, chill and sweet.
Your name is a kiss of snow
a gulp of icy spring water, blue
as a dove. About your name is: sleep. — Marina Tsvetaeva

I love the chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet ... the evenings in late autumn time, when the white mist creeps across the fields, making it seem as though old Earth, feeling the night air cold to its poor bones, were drawing ghostly bedclothes round its withered limbs. — Jerome K. Jerome

I used to think that if she were gone, you would come back to me."
"If she were gone, I would be nothing," Marco says. "You should think better of yourself than to settle for that."
They stand in silence on the empty street, the chill of the night air falling between them. — Erin Morgenstern

My hopes were all dead
struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which had been my master's
which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr Rochester's arms
it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted
confidence destroyed! — Charlotte Bronte

I like to wake up late, around 11 A.M., especially if I have been out the night before. Then I go to brunch with either my friends or my girlfriend. I then like to just chill out: read the papers, read some scripts and then take it very easy. If it's sunny, I go for a walk with my dog, Niles, in the countryside. — Douglas Booth

He squinted at us. "You really believe there might be zombies in Franklin Village?"
"Maybe," I said. "We just thought we'd patrol at night and search for them."
"But that could be dangerous," Trevor said. He leaned toward us. His eyes darted from Alec to me. "That could be very dangerous."
A chill rolled down my back. He had suddenly changed. His voice deepened. And his words sounded like a warning.
Or a threat. — R.L. Stine

Miri woke to the sleepy bleating of a goat. The world was as dark as eyes closed, but perhaps the goats could smell dawn seeping through the cracks in the house's stone walls. Though still half-asleep, she was aware of the late autumn chill hovering just outside her blanket, and she wanted to curl up tighter and sleep like a bear through frost and night and day. — Shannon Hale

Hurrying on, Barbee nodded to the workman as casually as he could. His skin felt goose-pimpled under the thin red robe, and he couldn't help shivering to a colder chill than he felt in the frosty air. For the quiet city, it seemed to him, was only a veil of painted illusion. Its air of sleepy peace concealed brooding horror, too frightful for sane minds to dwell upon. Even the cheery bricklayer with the lunch pail might - just might - be the monstrous Child of Night. — Jack Williamson

She folded her arms against the chill in the air, and he noticed again how little she was. Barely to his shoulders. Her chutzpah made him forget her small stature. Her chin was a pixielike triangle, and her eyes were like a shadowed forest. Deep. Mysterious. "Well. Good night," she said. What was he thinking? He cleared his throat. "Night." As he retrieved the ladder and carried it to his truck, he reminded himself of all the reasons why he shouldn't be noticing her hair or her chin and most definitely not her deep-green eyes. — Denise Hunter

Just the night before, a puma's howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn't get any richer than that. — Ed Lynskey

He bowed in a courtly way as he replied: I am Dracula. and I bid you welcome, Mr Harker, to my house. Come in; the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest. — Bram Stoker

From the edge of the forest where the mountains begin, a pack of sleeping wolves, huddled together in the cold, were woken. Travelling on the crystal air was a sound to fear in the night - the sound of parents calling out in anguish and loss.
A sound that would even chill the souls of beasts. — Sebastian Gregory

Listen for somebody trying to talk to you ...
(Silence)
This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian
Whoever tried to talk to me? When did I ever listen? When was I ever other than just myself, caring only for myself? — Iain M. Banks

Narrowing her eyes, Jocasta ground her teeth together and stalked toward the source of the magic. Her walking stick thudded against the ground in time with her step. She drew her cloak about her bony shoulders, huddling into it against the chill of the late October air. Her bones were too old to be traipsing about at this hour of the night, but that was what came of being the head of the SALEM Council. — Violet Merriweather

Girls in New York look like giraffes.
Long neck, long legs, tiny tits and ass.
Girls from L.A rock over sized shades.
And chill all day cause they already paid.
Girls in Miami ... string bikinis and bump techno by Dj Tiesto.
Girls from Detroit like electro
And dance all night till they break they neck yo. — Shwayze

I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind that had picked up speed and vigor from its Atlantic crossing. I'd study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the milk Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they'd been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation's slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November's chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called the "unfettered leewardings," here at the end of the world. — Mark Doty

Uncle Wiggens ain't really my uncle, everyone just calls him that. He's over eighty and fought in the War Between the States. He only has one leg and one hero, General Robert E. Lee. Uncle Wiggens manages to work Lee's name into pretty much any old conversation. You might say, 'My, it's cold today,' and he'd reply, 'You think this is cold? General Lee said it didn't even qualify as chill till your breath froze on your nose and made a little icicle.' He had about five different stories of how he lost his leg, every one of them entertaining.
That night I was listening to the version that involved him running five Yankees into a bear's den. — Kristin Levine

When Maggie became conscious that she was the person he sought, she felt, in spite of all the thought that had gone before, a glowing gladness at heart. Her eyes and cheeks were still brightened with her childlike enthusiasm in the dance; her whole frame was set to joy and tenderness; even the coming pain could not seem bitter
she was ready to welcome it as a part of life, for life at this moment seemed a keen vibrating consciousness poised above please or pain. This one, this last night, she might expand unrestrainedly in the warmth of the present without those chill, eating thoughts of the past and the future. — George Eliot

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. — Joseph Conrad

If the devil was going to come, I expected to see the myth of him. A demon with an asphalt shine. He'd be fury. A chill. A bad cough. Cujo at the car window, a ticket at the Creepshow booth, a leap into the depth of night. — Tiffany McDaniel

She thought of Akiva, the night he had come to her at the river, the crushing pain and shame in his face, and love, still love - sorrow and love and hope - and she remembered the night of the Warlord's ball, how Akiva had always been the right to Thiago's wrong, the heat to the Wolf's chill, the safety to this monster's menace. — Laini Taylor

On the other end of the porch the swing creaked pleasantly on its chains. This was the time of home-night he enjoyed, when his wife was inside asleep and he, at last, was alone. Time of year he enjoyed, too, the kind of peaceable weather you needed sleeves for but not a coat, chill in the air to make your scalp tingle but not set you to shivering. — Tom Franklin

Meg looked. The dark shadow was still there. It had not lessened or dispersed with the coming of night. And where the shadow was, the stars were not visible.
What could there be about a shadow that was so terrible that she knew that there had never been before or ever would be again, anything that would chill her with a fear that was beyond shuddering, beyond crying or screaming, beyond the possibility of comfort? — Madeleine L'Engle

I am too weary.
For oh, I am so terribly weary at last! I think, in all of London, there is no-one and nothing so weary as I - unless perhaps the river, which flows beneath the frigid sky, through its accustomed courses, to the sea. How deep, how black, how thick the water seems to-night! How soft its surface seems to lie. How chill its depths must be. — Sarah Waters

So the days slipped away, as each morning dawned bright and fair, and each evening followed cool and clear. But autumn was waning fast; slowly the golden light faded to pale silver, and the lingering leaves fell from the naked trees. A wind began to blow chill from the Misty Mountains to the east. The Hunter's Moon waxed round in the night sky, and put to flight all the lesser stars. But low in the South one star shone red. Every night, as the Moon waned again, it shone brighter and brighter. Frodo could see it from his window, deep in the heavens, burning like a watchful eye that glared above the trees on the brink of the valley. — J.R.R. Tolkien

A sickening howl stopped her, sucking the air out of her lungs.
The night's chatter silenced, even the loitering city rats pausing to listen.
Scarlet had heard wild wolves before, prowling the countryside in search of easy prey on the farms.
But never had a wolf's howl send a chill down her spine like that. — Marissa Meyer

After a long day, folk rest at night. After a long summer, folk play games and sit about in the winter. After a long life folk sit about the fire and stay warm, for the chill of death is upon them, and even the thickest bearskin can't keep off the shivering. — Jane Smiley

Gentlemen, do you know what is the finest speech that I ever in my life heard or read? It is the address of Garibaldi to his Roman soldiers, when he told them: "Soldier, what I have to offer you is fatigue, danger, struggle and death; the chill of the cold night in the free air, and heat under the burning sun; no lodgings, no munitions, no provisions, but forced marches, dangerous watchposts and the continual struggle with the bayonet against batteries;- - those who love freedom and their country may follow me." That is the most glorious speech I ever heard in my life. — Lajos Kossuth

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his. — Ted Kooser

When I felt ill and was on the way to becoming a burden to the other men, I noticed a growing chill in their attitude toward me. For people like us, living day and night on the brink of danger, the normal instinct of survival seems to strike inward, like a disease, distorting the personality and removing all motives other than those of sheer self-interest. That is why this afternoon I did not wait to go and tell my former comrades-in-arms what had happened to me. For one thing, they probably already knew; besides, it seemed unfair to risk awakening their dormant sense of humanity. — Shohei Ooka

It's like escaping a hot, bright room
for the serenity of a city at night, covered in snow.
People eliminated. A carpet of silence
for taxis to whisper across. The world becoming
a pleasant dream of itself. The itch
of want smoldering to life on skin. Memory sends
a chill vanishing between vertebrae.
It's New Year's Eve. Hail the Calendar! As if
clocks will pause for a moment
before reloading their long rifles. Years are tiny
freckles on the face of a century.
Where is the constellation we gazed at each night
Through a bill rolled so tight
the first President lost his breath, as our eyeballs
literally unraveled? I am alone
in the rectangular borough in the observatory,
where even fire trucks can't rescue
the arsonist stretching his calves in my brain. — Jeffrey McDaniel

Cold comradeship do stars provide.
They light the closer, inner side
Of night's vast weight, which, chill and clear,
Pulls on us like some puppeteer.
Its unseen threads to heads and hearts
Attached, it acts us through our parts,
From birth's first cry to bent old age,
Upon our distant, tiny stage. — McKenzie Bodkin

They had found two of his uncle's men in the wood, slain, but the corpses had risen in the chill of night. Jon's burnt fingers twitched as he remembered. He still saw the wight in his dreams, dead Othor with the burning blue eyes and the cold black hands, — George R R Martin

He smelt strongly of woodsmoke, blood, and unwashed male, but the night chill bit through my thin dress and I was happy enough to lean back against him. — Diana Gabaldon

It's not for Zeus's daughter to be A prey to common fears, I never feel Chill fingered panic's touch. But the horrors Creeping out of Old Night's womb Since the first beginnings of all things, 8940 With shapes as many as the fiery vapors Billowing from a crater's fiery mouth, Make even heroes' hearts turn faint. When — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe