The Dark Is Rising Quotes & Sayings

However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again. — Iris Murdoch

I suppose everybody has a mental picture of the days of the week, some seeing them as a circle, some as an endless line, and others again, for all I know, as triangles and cubes. Mine is a wavy line proceeding to infinity, dipping to Wednesday which is the colour of old silver dark with polishing and rising again to a pale gold Sunday. This day has a feeling in my picture of warmth and light breezes and sunshine and afternoons that stretch to infinity and mornings full of far-off bells. — Angela Thirkell

This thing was power from the Outside, and I was a grain of sand to its oncoming tide. But you know what? That grain of sand might be the last remnant of what had once been a mountain, but that which it is, it is. The tide comes and the tide goes. Let it hammer the grain of sand as it may. Let lofty mountains fear the slow, constant assault of the waters. Let the valleys shudder at the pitiless advance of ice. Let continents drown beneath the dark and rising tide. But that grain of sand? It isn't impressed. Let the tide roll in. The sand will still be there when it rolls out again. -Harry Dresden, Cold Days by Jim Butcher — Jim Butcher

The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the out-buildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away. — Susan Cooper

The cicadas buzzing, I can hear them through the window. Buzzing louder and louder. Just like the night I sat by the window in the dark, gasping for air, feeling the riddle wriggling in my chest, hearing the monster's heavy footsteps in my ears. And suddenly I know. What they do all those years living in the ground. The nymphs who are to become cicadas. Maybe they don't know it themselves, but they are writing their song. Collecting the notes in the dark earth. The song rising to the sky, this is how it is, this is how it always is. The song floating toward the sky comes from the underworld. — Lene Fogelberg

The water is still and smooth. Polished glass. Not a ripple of wind disturbs the dark surface. Low-rising mist drifts off liquid mountains floating against a purple-bruised sky. An eager breath shudders past my lips. Soon the sun will break. — Sophie Jordan

The cynics, they can only speak of the dark, of the obvious, and this is not hard. For all it's supposed sophistication, it's cynicism that's simplistic. In a fallen world, how profound is to see the cracks?
The sages and prophets, the disciples and revolutionaries, they are the ones up on the ramparts, up on the wall pointing to the dawn of the new Kingdom coming, pointing to the light that breaks through all things broken, pointing to redemption always rising and to the Blazing God who never sleeps. — Ann Voskamp

Tonight will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining. — Susan Cooper

As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched in puddle in the dirt, the smell of it rising into the night. There was no difference between my piss and June's. That's what i thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss is Piss. — Sue Monk Kidd

God chose to deliberately venture into and intentionally occupy depths far below and infinitely beyond that which any human has ever descended, and then to raise Himself back up to glory from those horridly dark places. And I pray that we never miss the fact that Christmas is God's invitation for us to join Him in the rising. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are. — Anne Lamott

Open up your Mind Rockin' Minds to the Cold Hard Reality that is my Songs & Dreams. — Gemini Rising Rockin' Machine, The

Reading consists of perusing razor-thin slices of perpetuity, wrenched from the heart of a murdered tree, and infused with the dark blood that swirls within the hidden depths of every writer's soul. It is their combined angst - the author's and the tree's - that we partake of when we immerse ourselves in the pages of a book. — Max Hawthorne

Will picked a single blossom from a gorse bush beside him; it shone bright yellow on his grubby hand. "People are very complicated," he said sadly.
"So they are," John Rowlands said. His voice deepened a little, louder and clearer than it had been. "But when the battles between you and your adversaries are done, Will Stanton, in the end the fate of all the world will depend on just those people, and on how many of them are good or bad, stupid or wise. And indeed it is all so complicated that I would not dare foretell what they will do with their world. Our world. — Susan Cooper

Holly Black is the Real Thing: a gifted writer with a solid grounding in what matters. Her stories are dark and splendid blooms rising from roots sunk deep in myth and tradition. — Ellen Kushner

You sleep with a dream of summer weather,
wake to the thrum of rain - roped down by rain.
Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass
and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace
has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.
The mountains have had the sense to disappear.
It's the Celtic temperament - wind, then torrents, then remorse.
Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.
Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,
docks in a pool of shadow all its own.
That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.
Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on. — Anne Stevenson

The nation is sick; trouble is in the land, confusion all around ... But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: 'We want to be free.' — Martin Luther King Jr.

Until now, I've never been able to see while I fly, and I feel a dizzying lightness as I look out at the land below us.
Is this what I've missed?
The stars have come to the earth, and the ocean has turned over the ground; dark waves meet the sky. They are unmoving, barely visible but for the light of the sun rising behind them.
Mountains, I realize. That's what the ocean is. Those waves are peaks. The stars are lights in houses and on streets. The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if we're lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are. — Ally Condie

The Formless Way
We look at it, and do not see it; it is invisible.
We listen to it, and do not hear it; it is inaudible.
We touch it, and do not feel it; it is intangible.
These three elude our inquiries, and hence merge into one.
Not by its rising, is it bright,
nor by its sinking, is it dark.
Infinite and eternal, it cannot be defined.
It returns to nothingness.
This is the form of the formless, being in non-being.
It is nebulous and elusive.
Meet it, and you do not see its beginning.
Follow it, and you do not see its end.
Stay with the ancient Way
in order to master what is present.
Knowing the primeval beginning is the essence of the Way. — Lao-Tzu

What place is this," Drizzt asked the cat quietly, "that I call home? These are my people, by skin and by heritage, but I am no kin to them. They are lost and ever will be. "How many others are like me, I wonder?" Drizzt whispered, taking one final look. "Doomed souls, as was Zaknafein, poor Zak. I do this for him, Guenhwyvar; I leave as he could not, His life has been my lesion, a dark scroll etched by the heavy price exacted by Matron Malice's evil promises. "Goodbye, Zack!" he cried, his voice rising in final defiance. "My father. Take heart, as do I, that when we meet again, in a life after this, it will surely not be in the hellfire our kin are doomed to endure. — R.A. Salvatore

They came generally from people writing theses on fantasy or on the Dark Is Rising books. They were full of questions I'd never thought about and false assumptions that I didn't want to think about. They would ask me in great detail for, say, the specific local and mythical derivations of my Greenwitch, a leaf-figure thrown over a Cornish cliff as a fertility sacrifice, and I would have to write back and say, "I'm terribly sorry; I made it all up." They told me I echoed Hassidic myth, which I hadn't read, and the Mormon suprastructure, which I'd never even heard of. They saw symbols and buried meanings and allegories everywhere. I'd thought I was making a clear soup, but for them it was a thick mysterious stew.

from "In Defense of the the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983) — Susan Cooper

The trick is to ride the wave,
Fast, wide-open and
in deep Now-magic.
Free, burning fear for fuel
Generous, knowing there is always more where that came from.
Cresting, spray of liquid jewels hanging, shining in the sun and wind.
Flying down the wave in graceful slices.
Rolling, tumbling under, over
Breathless falling, floating into the deep dark beneath.
Rising, face breaks the surface
Laughing
Kneeling, standing
Riding again.
Sunset waits behind the horizon
But daylight begs us to swim
Out beyond
Where our feet can't touch bottom.
Into the deep wild
Where the next wave can
sweep us higher,
Show us what else is possible
In this marvelous place. — Jacob Nordby

The dark has a eased a little. There has been a street-lamp burning, that has lit the threads of the bleached net scarf hung at the window, now it is put out. The light turns filthy pink. The pink gives way to sickly yellow. It creeps, and with it creeps sound - softly at first, then rising in a staggering crescendo: crowning cocks, whistles and bells, dogs, shrieking babies, violent calling, coughing, spitting, the tramp of feet, the endless hollow of beating hooves and the grinding of wheels. Up, up it comes, out of the throat of London. It is six or seven o'clock. — Sarah Waters

It so depends on each script, because you can say ... I always thought I wouldn't have wanted to do something that was kind of like as big and commercial as 'The Dark is Rising,' but I really liked the script. I thought it was really clever. — Amelia Warner

It is a burden ... (M)ake no mistake about that. Any great gift or power or talent is a burden and this more than any, and you will long to be free of it. But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law."
- Susan Cooper ("Merriman" The Dark is Rising) — Susan Cooper

That Figure so impressd it self upon my Mind that I have been in a manner walking towards it all my Life. Then I peered into Wendel Dietterlin his Architectura, and there were unveiled to me the several Orders: of the Tuscan, which is now mine own, I was then mov'd by its Strangeness and Awefulness; the obscured Shapes, the Shaddowes and the massie Openings so in-chanted my Spirit that when looking on them I imagined my self to be lock'd in some dark and Enclosed space. The heavinesse of Stone did so oppress me that I was close to Extinction, and I fancied that I could see in the Engraver's lines the sides of Demons, crumbled Walls, and half-humane Creatures rising from the Dust. There was some thing that waited for me there, already in Ruines. — Peter Ackroyd

Who has not at one time or another felt a sourness, wrath, selfishness, envy and pride, which he could not tell what to do with, or how to bear, rising up in him without his consent, casting a blackness over all his thoughts, and then as suddenly going off again, either by the cheerfulness of the sun or air, or some agreeable accident, and again at times as suddenly returning upon him? Sufficient indications are these to every man that there is a dark guest within him, concealed under the cover of flesh and blood, often lulled asleep by worldly light and amusements, yet such as will, in spite of everything, show itself... It is exceeding good and beneficial to us to discover this dark, disordered fire of our soul; because when rightly known and rightly dealt with, it can as well be made the foundation of heaven as it is of hell. — William Law

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated. — Salman Rushdie

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

Jones described what followed in his official report:
All the oil, the tanks, barrels,engines for pumping, engine-houses, and wagons- in a word, everything used for rising, holding, or sending it off was burned. The smoke is very dense and jet black. The boats, filled with oil in bulk, burst with a report almost equaling artillery, and spread the burning fuel down the river. Before night huge columns of ebony smoke marked the meanderings of the stream as far as the eye could see. By dark the oil from the tanks on the burning creek had reached the river and the whole stream was a sheet of fire. A burning river, carrying destruction to our merciless enemy, was a scene of magnificence that might well carry joy to every patriotic heart.- General William E. " Grumble" Jones — Clint Johnson

100,000,000 Guinea Pigs sparked a rising wave of consumer indignation. But ... it takes a major catastrophe to carry legal and enforcement action over the hump of lethargy and inaction ... Today, nearly forty years later, the situation is worse, not better. — John Fuller

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing ...
For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That's what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing. — John Banville

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

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? — Mary Oliver

Oh! if, when we oppress and grind our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in imagination, the deep testimony of the dead men's voices, which no power can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and injustice: the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong: that each day's life brings with it! — Charles Dickens