Quotes & Sayings About The Night Before

Before I left home for drama school in England, my father took me outside one night and told me that wherever I was, the moon would shine on both of us. Months later, walking in London, I'd look at the moon and feel his love. Now I've shared the ritual with my own kids. — Roma Downey

Sadhana Start by paying attention to everything you think of as yourself just before you fall asleep: your thoughts, your emotions, your hair, your skin, your clothes, your makeup. Know that none of this is you. There is no need to make any conclusion about what "you" are or what "truth" is. Truth is not a conclusion. If you keep the false conclusions at bay, truth will dawn. It is like your experience of the night: the sun has not gone; it is just that the planet is looking the other way. You're thinking, reading, talking about the self, because you're too busy looking the other way! You haven't paid enough attention to know what the self really is. What is needed is not a conclusion, but a turnaround. If you manage to enter sleep with this awareness, it will be significant. Since there is no external interference in sleep, this will grow into a powerful experience. Over time, you will enter a dimension beyond all accumulations. — Sadhguru

He shivered beneath her touch, and his jaw clenched. It pleased her. Her longing rose to the surface, and an unfamiliar emotion overcame her. It swam beneath her skin, lighting little flickers of recognition. It was the same heat - the same feeling - that had made her run the night before. Not this time, though. This time she would own it. Embrace it. Ride it. Enjoy it. — Justine Dell

The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands. — Will Rogers

My friend, I went to the market and bought the Dark One.
You claim by night, I claim by day.
Actually I was beating a drum all the time I was buying him.
You say I gave too much; I say too little.
Actually, I put him on a scale before I bought him.
What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels.
Mirabai says: The Dark One is my husband now.
Be with me when I lie down; you promised me this in an earlier life. — Mirabai

The British invasion was the most important event of my life. I was in New Jersey and the night I saw the Beatles changed everything. I had seen Elvis before and he had done nothing for me, but these guys were in a band. — Steven Van Zandt

the fact that he'd never before seen her in the evening. He was just short of being astounded that she could exist at this hour. He must have been the type who thought that beauty gets put in a box at night. But it couldn't be true, no, because there she was, facing him. — David Foenkinos

Planning of the next day's activities should be done a night before. This makes you not to be destructed by people and events that do not contribute to the success of your dreams. — Israelmore Ayivor

My beauty tricks revolve around eyes. For the early morning shoots, I pop eye pads in the freezer the night before, and when I take them out in the morning they are already cold and active and are great under my eyes. I keep my eye pads right next to my red velvet Ben & Jerry's in the freezer. — Christine Teigen

I sipped my own coffee, heavy on the sugar and cream, trying to make up for the late work the night before. Caffeine and sugar, the two basic food groups. — Laurell K. Hamilton

But I know nothing of time. I am new every day. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, and I die at night when I go to sleep. It is not my fault. And I am doing so well today. I am doing so much better than I have ever done before. — Paul Auster

This morning when I looked out the roof window
before dawn and a few stars were still caught
in the fragile weft of ebony night
I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
in this city far from the hammock of my mother's belly.
It works, of course, and deer came into this room
and wondered at finding themselves
in a house near downtown Denver.
Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
to get them back, to get all of us back,
because if it works I'm going with them.
And it's too early to call Louis
and nearly too late to go home.
[from poem, "Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On"] — Joy Harjo

At night, the valleys of my body curve around him, creating a geography I never knew existed before, where size is relative and more is always better, and I can't seem to get enough of it. — Tiffany Baker

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. — Cormac McCarthy

To Your eyes a thousand years are like yesterday come and gone, no more than a watch in the night.
You sweep men away like a dream, like grass which springs up in the morning.
In the morning it springs up and flowers, by evening it withers and fades.
So we are destroyed in Your anger, struck with terror in Your fury.
Our guilt lies open before You; our secrets in the light of Your face.
All our days pass away in Your anger. Our life is over like a sigh.
Our span is seventy years or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain, they pass swiftly and we are gone. — Psalm 89

The signs of the old flame, I know them well.
I pray that the earth gape deep enough to take me down
or the almighty Father blast me with one bolt to the shades,
the pale, glimmering shades in hell, the pit of night,
before I dishonor you, my conscience, break your laws. — Virgil

Before they disappeared into the night, Bella said, 'Why do you think anyone wants to conquer someone else?'
I don't know.'
Really not?'
Maybe to discover that person's secret.'
And then what?'
Then it's been discovered.'
Or not.'
Well, then you have to conquer that person again.'
Again and again,' she said. 'Every day, every night. — Maxim Biller

When I finish dressing before a night out and have put on all the accessories, I usually look at myself in the mirror long and hard and then end up removing something. Whether it's a belt, bracelet or a bauble, less is always more. — Joan Collins

Hyacinth, who wept before sleep, had wept that night; he had wept too - had wept in joy and pain, and in joy at his pain. When tears were done and their heads rested on one pillow, she had said that no man had ever wept with her before. Two floors below them, their reflected images knelt in the fishpond at Thelxiepeia's feet, subsistent but invisible. There she would weep for him longer than they lived. He lowered his naked body into a rising pool, warm and scarcely less romantic. Ermine — Gene Wolfe

The ninth king died in the night. Before his son could be crowned the next morning, the Gentle Lord, the prince of demons, descended upon the castle. In one hour of fire and wrath he killed the prince and rent the castle stone from stone. And then he dictated to us the new terms of our existence. — Rosamund Hodge

She is the person I ran to when I got my period; the one who helped me knit back together my first broken heart; the hand I would reach for in the middle of the night when I could no longer remember which side our father parted his hair on, or what it sounded like when our mother laughed. No matter what she is now, before all that, she was my built-in best friend. — Jodi Picoult

The balls were dry as wood, you had to lick and suck at them before they tasted like sour cherries. If you chewed them well, the pit felt very smooth and hot on the tongue. Those night cherries were a happy thing, but they only sharpened our hunger. — Herta Muller

There's a joy in having the molecule of an idea, then testing it in front of audiences at secret shows that people only know about the night before. — Mike Myers

In the passing of an instant everything stopped and there he stood at the bottom of the ocean in perfect stillness. He gazed into a strange and eerie light that seemed to draw closer as the fear in his heart faded. An amazing tunnel was extending towards him, smooth shiny walls in the night. Reaching his hand out to touch it he wondered; if he were to die in that moment, where would the life inside him go? His heart, bursting with unspent love and the breathtaking happiness in his soul, just disappearing into the ocean. Two more handfuls of salt dissolving in a world barely able to justify its own existence.

He heard a rushing sound as the sea inhaled again just before it struck him in the chest. A wall of sand and stones that blew him off his feet and sent him back out, his last thought escaping him in a long trail of bubbles.

'Stop fighting now Thomas - it's over. — Kevin Keely

One night after dinner a group of us were talking about the supernatural, and one of our dinner guests said that when the electric light was invented, people began to lose the dimension of the supernatural. In the days before we could touch a switch and flood every section of the room with light, there were always shadows in the corner, shadows which moved with candlelight, with firelight; and these shadows were an outward and visible sign that things are not always what they seem; there are things which are not visible to the mortal human being; there are things beyond our ken. — Madeleine L'Engle

Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway. — Jonathan Safran Foer

All this blackness was within him, but that was where it really mattered. It was night without moon or stars, it was a doorless pit in the earth's bowels, it was forever. He felt black ice growing, blooming in his veins. One last sharp feeling was left to him
the bitter taste of failure. Then that went too. All was nothing.
Cold and everlasting night, and an everlasting laughter that was older and colder than the stars he would never see again. His heart squirmed wildly in his chest, seeking an escape that was denied it. Laughter like a glacier came again, rolling and crushing all else before it.
A bird sang. — Susan Dexter

When I look at him, I don't see the cowardly young man who sold me out to Jeanine Matthews, and i don't hear the excuses he gave afterward.
When I look at him, I see the boy who held my hand in the hospital when our mother broke her wrist and told me it would be all right. I see the brother who told me to make my own choices, the night before the Choosing Ceremony. I think of all the remarkable things he is
smart and enthusiastic and observant, quiet and earnest and kind. — Veronica Roth

The night before I compete, I like to have steak. Meat is especially important for female athletes because it provides them with the nutrients they need to perform at their best. — Sasha Cohen

I unplug the phone and close the door and just stick with it. I don't ever go out for lunch and I don't take vacations. I like to be awake when no one else is: either just before dawn in the morning or late, late at night. Silence helps. — Mona Simpson

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class. — Bharati Mukherjee

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before. — Hannah Arendt

They stood silently before each other for a moment, and she thought that the most beautiful words were those which were not needed. When he moved, she said: "Don't say anything about the trial. Afterward." When he took her in his arms, she turned her body to meet his straight on, to feel the width of his chest with the width of hers, the length of his legs with the length of hers, as if she were lying against him, and her feet felt no weight, and she was held upright by the pressure of his body. They lay in bed together that night, and they did not know when they slept, the intervals of exhausted unconsciousness as intense an act of union as the convulsed meetings of their bodies. — Ayn Rand

He spoke to her, though, if only through his verse. One night in the banqueting hall, just before a ball, he responded to requests for a verse by raising his glass high. Though he spoke to them all his eyes were on her.

"Tis not that I am weary grown
Of being yours, and yours alone,
But with what face can I incline
To damn you to be only mine?"

She walked out before she heard the rest. — Judith James

I always prayed the same way at night: "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Please bless my mother, father, sister, everyone in the word, and me. And please make my father quit drinking."
As a child growing up in a family battling alcoholism, this is what I know: Something bad is coming; it always does. I can't ask for help; I'm too ashamed. I can't talk about our secrets; no one understands. I can't trust anyone; they always leave.
Questions bounced off my self-constructed wall of values
a barricade I'd made from the fears I'd pushed into my darkness.
How could Ryan, a professional baseball player, really resist all those women? How could I really trust Jerry, my childhood friend? I'd barely awakened to sex and already boys were the seventh wonder of the world. Did anyone really trust another person? I needed proof. That proof hadn't revealed itself ... yet. — Pamela Taeuffer

Dexter did not kick the can. And now Dexter is It. Again. You may wonder, how can this be? How can Dexter's night hunt be reduced to this? Always before there has been some frightful twisted predator awaiting the special attention of frightful twisted Dexter - and here I am, stalking an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can that is guilty of nothing worse than bland sauce. — Jeff Lindsay

I enjoy having breakfast in bed. I like waking up to the smell of bacon, sue me. And since I don't have a butler, I have to do it myself. So, most nights before I go to bed, I will lay six strips of bacon out on my George Foreman grill. Then I go to sleep. When I wake up, I plug in the grill. I go back to sleep again. Then I wake up to the smell of crackling bacon. It is delicious, it's good for me, it's the perfect way to start the day. — Michael Scott

I'm not one to insist that a man can't possibly make it without a lot of formal education, since my own formal education pretty much stopped when I graduated from Independence High School in 1901. And then there was a twenty-two-year gap, while I worked on a farm and as a railroad timekeeper and served in the Army and did a lot of other things, before I started to attend night classes at Kansas City Law School - and I left there in 1925 and never got a degree. But I've tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading, — Harry Truman

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she'd remember the brutal fact that had caused it. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I know no surer way of shaking off the dreary crust formed about the soul by the trying to do one's duty or the patient enduring of having somebody else's duty done to one, than going out alone, either at the bright beginning of the day, when the earth is still unsoiled by the feet of the strenuous and only God is abroad; or in the evening, when the hush has come, out to the blessed stars, and looking up at them wonder at the meanness of the day just past, at the worthlessness of the things one has struggled for, at the folly of having been so angry, and so restless, and so much afraid. Nothing focusses life more exactly than a little while alone at night with the stars. What are perfunctory bedroom prayers hurried through in an atmosphere of blankets, to this deep abasement of the spirit before the majesty of heaven? And as a consecration of what should be yet one more happy day, of what value are those hasty morning devotions, — Elizabeth Von Arnim

As the campfire radiated warmth in the opening of the lean-to, Red Macalister crouched before the burning logs. He added more wood to the blaze, then rocked back on his boot heels, studying the flames, and decided the fire would do for the next few hours to ward off the cold winter night. He glanced up at the black sky dotted with diamonds. A clear night. — Debra Holland

On the second night here, the Koreans played and the streets had to be closed down to traffic for half a day before the game. In a remarkable coincidence, everyone came to town wearing the same type of red T-shirt. The Koreans gathered like a huge blob of ketchup and went mad in a quiet, Dufferlike way. You haven't seen crowds until you've seen Korean crowds. They gathered. They cheered in unison. They clapped and exuberated.
Then they tidied up after themselves and went home.
If you ever have to have half-a-million people in your house for a function, make sure they are Koreans. — Tom Humphries

So we may well believe that the King's men were shriven on the night before they fought. Something of the young man's vision had penetrated to his captains and his soldiers. Something of the new ideal of the Round Table which was to be born in pain, something about doing a hateful and dangerous action for the sake of decency
for they knew that the fight was to be fought in blood and death without reward. They would get nothing but the unmarketable conscience of having done what they ought to do in spite of fear
something which wicked people have often debased by calling it glory with too much sentiment, but which is glory all the same. This idea was in the hearts of the young men who knelt before the God-distributing bishops
knowing that the odds were three to one, and that their own warm bodies might be cold at sunset. — T.H. White

Without knowing I was going to, I started to laugh, a crazy laugh like Ian's the night before, and at first he looked worried, but then he started too. Even with the wind whipping past the station, even with Ian hugging his backpack to his chest for warmth, we were laughing, and not a laughter of release or a laughter that was really sadness in disguise. It was the laugh of the absurd. Your grandmother is a seventeen-year-old boy? That creepy Russian man just paid for your ticket? Ferret-Glo? — Rebecca Makkai

You think a man doesn't fall down, son? A real man falls down nine times and gets up ten. You think real men don't get scared? We do, all the time, especially when the people we love can be taken away from us. The key to manhood is being there, every morning when she wakes up, every night before she goes to bed. That's what a man does. It has nothing to do with how good you are with some shiny knives. And if you let her do this thing alone, then by God - — Ann Aguirre

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year. — Pat Conroy

She remained silent. There was nothing left to say. He'd said it all the night before. He had to end it. He could never leave his wife. And, in fact, she had known this. Although she loved him - and truly she did - he wasn't hers. He belonged to his wife. She'd earned him. It didn't matter that he was her first love or that she was his passion. It didn't matter that they had loved one another for more than half their lives. It didn't matter that he had married his wife on the rebound. It didn't matter that he didn't love the woman. It didn't even matter that they had turned into some soap-opera cliche. He was married to someone else and that meant that she was leftovers and destined to remain on the periphery in the shadow of another woman's marriage. But no more. She was well and truly sick of it. — Anna McPartlin

Tropical night breezes from the mountains rattled the copey leaves along the boulevard where Harry Penfield was hiding. Harry had planted those copey himself three years before and was astonished that he could conceal himself in their dark shadow such a short time later. He shifted the holstered .38 more toward the center of his back and listened for the sound of an engine. — Jimmy Olsen

Well, I suppose we must be going on again,' he said. 'I wonder how long it will be before we really are caught and all the toiling and the slinking will be over, and in vain.' He stood up. 'It's dark, and we cannot use the Lady's glass. Keep it safe for me, Sam. I have nowhere to keep it now, except in my hand, and I shall need both hands in the blind night. But Sting I give to you. I have got an orc-blade, but I do not think it will be my part to strike any blow again. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Twas the night before Thanksgiving.
All the food's in the oven.
And I'm in the bedroom performin' self lovin'. — Craig Ferguson

Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night ... Other men, the world over, worship regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees. — Anthony Trollope

I love 'Saturday Night Live,' and I really feel like people who have left before me have always stayed with the show. They never really quite left, which is nice. Everyone kind of stays close. — Fred Armisen

People don't have to go to cable news or network news. Live sports is the one of many things that's kind of community television. There are a lot of people who still tune in to "Sunday Night Football" or "Thursday Night Football" the way they did before. — Henry Blodget

But the restlessness Quentin had been conscious of last night had shifted abruptly into a deep, cold sense of foreboding this morning when Diana had opened her eyes so suddenly to make an eerily familiar statement.

"It's coming."

And it had required all his willpower to allow her to leave his sight. To walk away from him, back up the well-lit paths to her cottage in order to change. Because that was exactly what Missy had said to him twenty-five years before.

The last time he had seen her alive. — Kay Hooper

The idea (for the painting 'Room in New York', 1932, ed.) had been in my mind a long time before I painted it. It was suggested by glimpses of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night, probably near the district where I live (Washington Square, New York, fh) although it's no particular street or house, but is really a synthesis of many impressions. — Edward Hopper

When you asked me to stay away from you in your note, it finally hit me. You meant it. You weren't going to try anymore. I'd run out of chances, and I realized that the night before would be the last time I ever saw you. And I couldn't ... The whole time on that plane I ... I kept thinking to myself if I could just get to you I would tell you I loved you and I'd get to keep you. I'm that selfish. — Samantha Young

I touched the moon last night;
a golden glow beyond my grasp.
Eons before me it rested there.
It will remain when I am dust.
My hand now glows from the embrace.
Voices echo through nights past,
and with the glow, caress my face.
My finger faints from what will last.
Alone I am; alone secure;
the moon will last when I am gone.
A Master set it in its' place,
to move the tide, refresh the dawn.
Unnumbered eyes have felt its rest;
have looked upon reflected light.
My heart is moved away from pain;
I touched the moon last night. — Craig Froman

He paused at the bedroom door, shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and walked right out like it was any other morning, and he and Jack would be having breakfast as if they hadn't had sex the night before.
"Morning," he said, casting a quick glance over his shoulder.
"Mmm," D grunted.
"You done in the bathroom?"
D blinked. No, I jus' took a little breather in the middle a my mornin' beauty ritual ta come out here 'n' chat with ya. A course I'm done. — Jane Seville

On a film you can really get away with learning the scene the night before and that's often just not possible with TV, so you have to be a little bit more prepared a little bit more in advance. — Claire Danes

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita's fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all. — Sonia Sotomayor

He had seen God in the night sky long before he understood its patterns. — Kate Grenville

Always, sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilaccoloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it "the new thing" or "the new thing in the river," and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled. I — V.S. Naipaul

Junction nineteen! Una, she came off at Junction nineteen! You've added an hour to your journey before you even started. Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?"
Oh GOD. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to THEM and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still having sex?" Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-it-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, "Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo," than, "Super, thanks. — Helen Fielding

At work she became instant best friends with the Clinique girl, Susan, a Waynesboro muscle-car aficionado. She was fond of dispensinf wisdom along the lines or: "The bullshit stops when the green light pops!" I'd go to the mall to pick up Renee. take them both a couple of coffees, and hang out while they chattered in their hot white coats. Susan would take Renee to hot-rod shows and run-what-ya-brung drag races. She brought out sides of Renee I'd never gotten to see before, and it was a sight to behold. After a night out with Susan, Renee would always come back saying things like, "If it's got tits or tires, it's going to cost you money. — Rob Sheffield

The truth a fairly important thing to hold on to when you've been pulled out of the sea after wanting to drown in it. I could've let the sea take me. I could easily be dead now, which is funny when you think of it. When I say funny, what I actually mean is weird and kind of disturbing.
When there's the loud sound of a siren screaming in your head it doesn't take too long before a feeling of not caring what happens washed over you and you become recklessly self- destructive. I used to be full of energy and happiness but I could barely remember those kinds of feelings. The cheerful, childish things I used to think had been replaced. A whole load of new realisations had begun to grow inside me like tangled weeds, and they were starting to kill me. That's why I'd make the decision that involved heading ogg to the pier on my pike in the middle of the night and cycling off it. — Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

The night before 'The Elephant Man' opened, we had a sleepover for 12 kids. Being organized is the key. — Scott Ellis

Some things are not meant to be, Leighton Atwood had said the night before. But if they were not meant to be, then why did the forces of destiny keep bringing them together? — Sherry Thomas

I tried so hard with movies like Vertigo and Middle of the Night and others. I felt those would show me that it's only a matter of time before I'd find the right one to reach out and touch people. — Kim Novak

Back then, I didn't understand that what was happening in my house was not happening in everyone's house at night, when the doors were shut and the blinds were drawn. It took me just as long to sort out my physical self - how to dress in a way that flattered my shape, how to do my hair and makeup (or pay professionals to do it), how to be in a body, in the world. It took time before I could take all that pain and use it; transform all that loneliness and isolation and shame into stories. — Jennifer Weiner

I find it very difficult to do anything on my own now because people recognize me. This has never happened to me before because I haven't really done television before. But I suppose if you're in people's rooms all the time, I don't know - I was thinking the other night with people like DiCaprio and, you know, those big stars and Cate Blanchett, and you just think how did they exist? It's so difficult. And I think now it's very intrusive because of these cellphones, you know, with cameras. — Maggie Smith

The evening is nearly over. Before long it will be last call and Good Night, Ladies. Only a few more minutes and exhilaration will start its inevitable leakage. Even the best, dizziest times have that moment of deflation when people realize that everything has already happened. But for now all possibilities are intact. — Jean Thompson

The night I proposed, I cried like a baby. She said: 'What you want to cry for, Doc? 'Course we'll be married. I've never been married before.' Well, I had to laugh, hug and squeeze her: never been married before! — Truman Capote

Reading was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent all my time in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be called a stack-up loner. — Haruki Murakami

Sam was creative and dedicated, but his wasn't the plodding bright-and-early work ethic of the morning person, like mine. It was the crazy creative burst of the night owl, long dark hours of despair before dawn. — Jennifer Echols

The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen. — Kate Wilhelm

She had never heard the word 'intellectual' used as a noun before she went to Barnard, and she took it to heart. It was a brave noun, a proud noun, a noun suggesting lifelong dedication to lofty things and a cool disdain for the commonplace. An intellectual might lose her virginity to a soldier in the park, but she could learn to look back on it with wry, amused detachment. An intellectual might have a mother who showed her underpants when drunk, but she wouldn't let it bother her. And Emily Grimes might not be an intellectual yet, but if she took copious notes in even the dullest of her classes, and if she read every night until her eyes ached, it was only a question of time. — Richard Yates

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 overhead, 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 the life, ever. — Donna Tartt

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past ... and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. — Tea Obreht

He loved his entire family, including his mother, but growing up with them had taught him that not every intimate detail needed to be shared. He hadn't wanted to know that his parents had enjoyed a new sexual technique the night before or that his sisters had their periods. He hadn't wanted to talk about his own sexual development or, back when he'd been a teenager, have his mother ask him, over breakfast, if he'd masturbated yet that day. — Susan Mallery

Fuller Warren had won the 1948 election by running as a moderate and promising to ease racial tension and violence in Florida. He'd denounced the Klansmen who paraded through Lake County on election night (with Sheriff Willis McCall following behind) as "hooded hoodlums and sheeted jerks," and Moore cautiously held out some hope for the new governor. Warren had admitted to being a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, but renouncing his past, like many a politician before and since, he'd stated that he had joined years before "as a favor to a friend" and that he "never wore a hood." Moore did not adopt a wait-and-see approach with the new governor. — Gilbert King

She was full of warm hues and dark curves, and actually looked better than the night before, but she moved the same way, swaying back and forth with a body that looked like it never heard of old man gravity. — Matt Abraham

The town was peopled with sleepwalkers, whose trance was broken only on the rare occasions when at night their wounds, to all appearance closed, suddenly reopened. Then, waking with a start, they would run their fingers over the wounds with a sort of absentminded curiosity, twisting their lips, and in a flash their grief blazed up again, and abruptly there rose before them the mournful visage of their love. In the morning they harked back to normal conditions, in other words, the plague. — Albert Camus

All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between ... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homewards and let new lights come in with the sun. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before? — Joan Didion

Realizing that Abigail - given that she'd had relatively no sleep the night before - was in no state to deal with an irate daughter, Lucetta did the only thing she could think of. She drew in a deep breath, closed her eyes, then summoned up every acting ability she had at her disposal, right before she released a moan and dropped to the ground. — Jen Turano

I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-'60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn't the night before. — Dick Cavett

She trekked back across the meadow and down through the trees in possession of the oldest secret known to man. She sat on the mooring stone and surrendered immediately to the down of night. She hadn't slept long before she suddenly jolted awake. Thought she had heard the sweet call of a lark ascending. Unaware that it was actually the sound of her soul awakening. — Sarah Winman

Having released the wartime images he was carrying in his unconscious, he became worried that he would now be at their mercy, plagued by them in day as well as by night. But what he found was just the opposite. While he did retrieve the horrible images, he rediscovered a lost innocence as well. The beauty of the jungle, the glistening white sands of the Vietnamese beaches, and the intense greens of the rice paddies at dawn all filtered back to him. Not only did he remember his trauma, he remembered himself before his trauma. — Mark Epstein

What I really needed wasn't a dose of school spirit; it was a glass of water, an aspirin the size of my fist, and the answers to the history exam that I hadn't studied for the night before. "As long as I'm dreaming," I muttered, my words lost to the cacophony of the gym, "I'd also like a pony, a convertible, and a couple of friends."
"That's a tall order." I'd known that there were people sitting next to me, but I couldn't begin to imagine how one of them had heard me. I hadn't even heard me. "Would you settle for a piece of gum, an orange Tic Tac, and an introduction the the school slut? — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Military metaphors are rarely exact, but sending Republicans against Democrats when the issue hangs in the balance is nearly always as futile as sending George B. McClellan against Robert E. Lee, the Italians against Marshal Montgomery's desert rats or an Arab armored division against an Israeli rifle company. The copy desk can write the headline before the battle begins and take the rest of the night off. — Wesley Pruden

The next night I sat at the table at dinnertime, too, and ate soup and bread with preserves. Before she blew out the candles, Drenka spread a sheet across the sofa and called me over. I felt my spine lengthen like it hadn't during the weeks of sleeping contracted on the kitchen floor, and I stretched my arms over my head and pushed myself deep into the cushions of the couch. — Sara Novic

There were nights for instance, especially in August, where the view of the full moon from the top of the Acropolis hill or from a high terrace could steal your breath away. The moon would slide over the clouds like a seducing princess dressed in her finest silvery silk. And the sky would be full of stars that trembled feebly, like servants that bowed before her. During those nights under the light of the August full moon, the city of Athens would become an enchanted kingdom that slept lazily under the sweet light of its ethereal mistress. — Effrosyni Moschoudi

Long before they had ever met, I think this destiny awaited them. They were not like ships passing in the night. It wasn't like they didn't understand each other. They understood each other better than anyone else, and each was focused solely on the other. — Gen Urobuchi

stood for a while and looked about him, but when he had looked long enough he crossed the threshold and went within the precincts of the house. There he found all the chief people among the Phaeacians making their drink offerings to Mercury, which they always did the last thing before going away for the night. 61 He went straight through the court, still hidden by the cloak of darkness in which Minerva had enveloped him, till he reached Arete and King Alcinous; then he laid his hands upon the knees of the queen, and at that moment the miraculous darkness fell away from him and — Homer

Our destiny is aligned with our heart's innermost longing, a longing embedded within our soul before birth. This longing is a unique pattern or configuration reminiscent of the constellations in the night sky. When we express (press out) our unique configuration, it shines through us with an otherworldly luminosity, manifesting abundance in our lives and the lives of others. Our sole task is to yoke our inner destiny, thread it through our lives and weave it into the world. All else is just shadows and dust. — Thea Euryphaessa

I would save studying for a test until the night before the test because I didn't know if I was even going to be alive to take it anyway, so why bother? This was the attitude of all my friends. — Brigitte Gabriel

He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the Ioti wanted so badly for their spaceflight and their prestige. He knew also that he had not achieved it and might never do so. He had never admitted either fact clearly to anyone. Before he left Anarres, he had thought the thing was in his grasp.
...
He wasn't quite sure he was ready to publish. There was something not quite right, something that needed a little refining. As he had been working ten years on the theory, it wouldn't hurt to take a little longer, to get it polished perfectly smooth. The little something not quite right kept looking wronger. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A crack right through the foundations...The night before he left Anarres he had burned every paper he had on the General Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a year he had, in their terms, been bluffing them.

Or had he been bluffing himself? — Ursula K. Le Guin

That night we push our cots just a little closer together, and look into each other's eyes in the moments before we fall asleep. When he finally drifts off, our fingers are twisted together in the space between the beds.
I smile a little, and let myself go. — Veronica Roth

I thought about what a priest of Elua had told me about love many years ago, the first time I kept his vigil on the Longest Night. You will find it and lose it, again and again. And with each finding and each loss, you will become more than before. What you make of it is yours to choose. It was true. — Jacqueline Carey

When your soul is pricked by compunction and gradually changed, it becomes a fountain flowing with rivers of tears and compunction. If any one of you ever happens to communicate with tears, whether you weep before the Liturgy or in the course of the Divine Liturgy, or at the very time that you receive the Divine Gifts, and does not desire to do this for the rest of his days and nights, it will avail him nothing to have wept merely once. It is not this alone that at once purifies us and makes us worthy; it is daily compunction that does not cease until death. — Symeon The New Theologian