Night Vale Quotes & Sayings

No one cared about a woman staring through binoculars from a parked car. It was a common sight. There were three other cars with binoculared, watching women just on that block, and that was light by Night Vale standards. — Joseph Fink

To be remembered is, I think, a badic human right. Not one that occurs to a person when it is there, but like a parched throat in a desert when it is gone. — Joseph Fink

Valentine's Day is a disaster. Any day that is designed to perfectly encapsulate something as messy and personal as two people in a romantic relationship would have to be. But in Night Vale it also kills people. This is called satire. — Joseph Fink

You're a good one, Jackie Fierro," they said. "And that makes the world a dangerous place for you. — Joseph Fink

The study found widespread dissatisfaction with our town's public library, and, when considering the facts, it's easy to see why. The public computers for Internet use are outdated and slow. The lending period of fourteen days is not nearly long enough to read lengthier books, given the busy schedule of all our lives. The fatality rate is also well above the national average for public libraries. — Joseph Fink

Today Jackie was following the Troy who was a loan manager at the Last Bank of Night Vale ('We put our customers second, and our apocalyptic prophecies first!'). This Troy had very regular hours, not just at his work but in his life outside of work, and so he was especially easy to tail. — Joseph Fink

Such are the foolish dreams of idealistic children who believe that anything can possibly get better over time. — Joseph Fink

Perfection is not real. Perfection is not human. Carlos is not perfect- no, even better- he is imperfect. Everything about him, and us, and all of this is imperfect. And those imperfections in our reality are the seams and cracks into which our outsized love can seep and pool. — Cecil Baldwin

Remember: if you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget. — Cecil Baldwin

This is Night Vale. Our mayor once led an army of masked warriors from another dimension through magic doors to defeat an army of smiling blood-covered office workers. There is definitely, definitely another way. — Joseph Fink

We have nothing to speak about. There never was. Words are an unnecessary trouble. Expression is time wasting away. Any communication is just a yelp in the darkness. I am speaking now but I am saying nothing. I am just making noises, and, as it happens, they are organized in words and you should not draw meaning from this. — Cecil Baldwin

Dear, be kind to the mothers of Night Vale. Have pity on us. It'll be no easier for Diane. Things go strange here. Your children forget you, and the courses of their lives get frozen. Or they change shapes every day, and they think that just because they look completely different you won't be able to recognize them. But you always will. You always know your child, even when your child doesn't know you. — Joseph Fink

Look, life is stressful. This is true everywhere. But life in Night Vale is more stressful. There are things lurking in the shadows. Not the projections of a worried mind, but literal Things, lurking, literally, in shadows. Conspiracies are hidden in every storefront, under every street, and floating in helicopters above. And with all that there is still the bland tragedy of life. Births, deaths, comings, goings, the gulf of subjectivity and bravado between us and everyone we care about. All is sorrow, as a man once said without really doing much about it. — Joseph Fink

What?' Diane was enjoying listening to Cecil. She loved the end of his show, when he said, 'Good night, Night Vale, good night.' No matter how difficult her life was or how troublesome the news he was reporting, his voice and his sign-off put her at such ease. — Joseph Fink

She said if good-hearted families travel to Night Vale only to find their subconsciouses besieged with unforgettable revelations, horrors buried so deep as to be completely indescribable, revealing wholly unbearable new truths, then we certainly can't expect these people to return, let alone leave good Yelp ratings for local businesses. — Joseph Fink

She had recently turned nineteen. She had been recently nineteen for as long as she could remember. The pawnshop had been hers for a long time, centuries maybe. Clocks and calendars don't work in Night Vale. Time itself doesn't work. — Joseph Fink

Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you now. The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present. This now, this us? We can cope with that. We can do this together. You and I, drowsily, but comfortably. — Cecil Baldwin

The moon's weird though, right? It's there, and there, and then suddenly it's not. And it seems to be pretty far up. Is it watching us? If not, what is it watching instead? Is there something more interesting than us? Hey, watch us moon! We may not always be the best show in the universe, but we try. — Cecil Baldwin

The present tense of regret is indecision. — Cecil Baldwin

We understand the lights. We understand the lights above the Arby's. We understand so much. But the sky behind those lights, mostly void, partially stars, that sky reminds us: We don't understand even more. — Joseph Fink

Reports also indicate that the Night Vale Private Library will be entirely free of librarians, a fact that will be of little comfort to the many public library-goers who are injured or killed in librarian maulings every year. — Joseph Fink

About six in the evening I came out of the moorland to a white ribbon of road which wound up the narrow vale of a lowland stream. As I followed it, fields gave place to bent, the glen became a plateau, and presently I had reached a kind of pass where a solitary house smoked in the twilight. The road swung over a bridge, and leaning on the parapet was a young man. He was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the water with spectacled eyes. In his left hand was a small book with a finger marking the place. Slowly he repeated - As when a Gryphon through the wilderness With winged step, o'er hill and moory dale Pursues the Arimaspian. He jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a pleasant sunburnt boyish face. 'Good evening to you,' he said gravely. 'It's a fine night for the road.' The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me from the house. — John Buchan

...their relationship was a point of near-constant discussion in Night Vale, all of their imperfections and faults, which made them individuals worth loving. They had built those faults into the usual messy, comfortable, patched-up, beautiful structure that any functioning long-term relationship ended up being. — Joseph Fink

High Pasture
Come up
come up: in the dim vale below
The autumn mist muffles the fading trees,
But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze
Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,
Night is not, autumn is not
but the flow
Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,
Poured from the far world's flaming boundaries
In waxing tides of unimagined glow.
And to that height illumined of the mind
he calls us still by the familiar way,
Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,
Befogged in failure, chilled with love's decay
Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,
How on the heights is day and still more day. — Edith Wharton

John Peters certainly seemed to think she was involved. And why not Diane? Wasn't Night Vale a town full of hidden evils and the secretly malevolent? That was what the Tourism Board's new brochures said right on the front ('A town full of hidden evils and the secretly malevolent') along with a picture of a diverse group of townsfolk smiling and looking up at the camera in the windowless prison they would be kept in until enough tourists visited town to buy their release. — Joseph Fink

The only pawn shop in the town of Night Vale is run by the very young Jackie Fierro. It has no name, but if you need it, you will know where it is. This knowledge will come suddenly, often while you are in the shower. You will collapse, surrounded by a bright glowing blackness, and you will find yourself on your hands and knees, the warm water running over you, and you will know where the pawn shop is. You will smell must, and soap, and feel a stab of panic about how alone you are.

It will be like most showers you've taken. — Joseph Fink

Night Vale, my sweet and only Night Vale, may you find love. May you find it wherever it's been hidden. May you find who has been hiding it and extract revenge upon them. — Joseph Fink

Diana go slowly out with the others, to walk home alone through the Birch Path and Violet Vale, it was all the former could do to keep her seat and refrain from rushing impulsively after her chum. A lump came into her throat, and she hastily retired behind the pages of her uplifted Latin grammar to hide the tears in her eyes. Not for worlds would Anne have had Gilbert Blythe or Josie Pye see those tears. "But, oh, Marilla, I really felt that I had tasted the bitterness of death, as Mr. Allan said in his sermon last Sunday, when I saw Diana go out alone," she said mournfully that night. "I thought how splendid it would have been if Diana had only been going to study for the Entrance, too. But we can't have things perfect in this imperfect world, as Mrs. Lynde says. Mrs. — L.M. Montgomery

Now deep in ocean sunk the lamp of light, And drew behind the cloudy vale of night. — Homer

O Moon that rid'st the night to wake
Before the dawn is pale,
The hamadryad in the brake,
The Satyr in the vale,
Caught in thy net of shadows
What dreams hast thou to show?
Who treads the silent meadows
To worship thee below?
The patter of the rain is hushed,
The wind's wild dance is done,
Cloud-mountains ruby-red were flushed
About the setting sun:
And now beneath thy argent beam
The wildwood standeth still,
Some spirit of an ancient dream
Breathes from the silent hill.

Witch-Goddess Moon, thy spell invokes
The Ancient Ones of night,
Once more the old stone altar smokes,
The fire is glimmering bright.
Scattered and few thy children be,
Yet gather we unknown
To dance the old round merrily
About the time-worn stone.
We ask no Heaven, we fear no Hell,
Nor mourn our outcast lot,
Treading the mazes of a spell
By priests and men forgot. — Gerald Gardner

It's nice to have a station pet. Wish it wasn't trapped in a hovering prison in the men's bathroom, but listen: no pet is perfect. It becomes perfect when you learn to accept it for what it is. — Cecil Baldwin

Dammit!" she said, stabbing the paper with her butter knife and then repeated "Dammit" a couple of more times in a hopeless decrescendo.
"KING CITY," said the paper.
"Yeah, yeah, so I've heard," she muttered. No one around her noticed. Teenagers shout things a lot while smashing knives near their hands, everyone knew. — Joseph Fink

And now a brief public service announcement. Alligators: can they kill your children? Yes. — Cecil Baldwin

Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud-and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word. But in the night of Death Hope sees a star and listening Love can hear the rustling of a wing. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Most people in Night Vale get by with a cobbled-together framework of lies and assumptions and conspiracy theories. Diane was like most people. Most people are. — Joseph Fink

To be remembered is, I think, a basic human right. Not one that occurs to a person when it is there, but like a parched throat in the desert when it is gone. — Joseph Fink

Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they're happening, they feel like the only thing that matters and you can hardly imagine that there's a world out there that might have anything else going on. And then the glow cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find, as time passes, that you remember it less and less. Or absolutely not at all, in my case. — Cecil Baldwin