Quotes & Sayings About The Night Shift

As if the daytime wasn't bad enough, I dream about him. Every night for three nights in a row. I can't get out of that moment when I was in his head, feeling what he felt, hearing his thoughts as he kissed me. I can feel him loving me. And it kills me, that moment when I feel his love shift into fear — Cynthia Hand

When I have an argument with someone, even with someone I am not very close with, I can't sleep at night thinking about it. It's terrible. But I still manage speak out frankly because I have also been gifted with the ability to read people. I can sense when they start to get irritated with me, and then, I shift. — Hans Rosling

the suit, if there is one, we still lose because of the publicity." I was scarcely hearing a word of it. Horrible images were playing crazily inside my mind. The 911 call, the fact it was aborted, made me see it. I knew what happened. Lori Petersen was exhausted after her ER shift, and her husband had told her he would be in later than usual that night. So she went to bed, perhaps planning to sleep just awhile, until he got home - as I used to do when I was a resident and waiting for Tony to come home from the law library at Georgetown. She woke up at the sound of someone inside the house, perhaps the quiet sound of this person's footsteps coming down the hallway toward the bedroom. Confused, she called out the name of her husband. No one answered. In that instant of dark silence that must have seemed an — Patricia Cornwell

He stands before a door that will not open
wood sometimes, iron, but always the same door, set into a well, maybe in the anonymous middle of some city block, unattended, no one in control of who enters and who can't, a blank door hardly different from the wall it is set into, silent, insert, no handle or knob, no lock or keyhole, fitting so tightly into its wall that not even a knifeblade can be slipped between them ... He could wait across the street, keep vigil all night and day and night again, praying though not in the usual way, exactly, for the unmarked hour when at last the quality of shadow at the edge of the door might slowly begin to change, the geometry deepen and shift, the unasked-for as that, the route to some so-far-undreamable interior lie open, a way in whose way back out lies too far ahead in the dream to worry about — Thomas Pynchon

My favorite actor was, is, Michael Keaton. Certainly growing up, in the movie 'Night Shift' he did something brand new that I hadn't seen before that we all steal from now. And then it was in 1987 he did the movie 'Clean and Sober' and 'Beetlejuice' in the same year, and that was when I said, 'Wow, that's what I want to do.' — Matthew Perry

Lysandra... Lady of Caraverre."
"There is no Caraverre," Darrow said.
Aelin shrugged. "There is now." Lysandra had settled on the name a week ago, whatever it meant, bolting upright in the middle of the night and practically shouting it at Aelin once she'd mastered herself long enough to shift back into her human form. Aelin doubted she'd soon forget the image of a wide-eyed ghost leopard trying to speak. — Sarah J. Maas

The first feature film I did, when I did 'Night Shift,' I improvised quite a bit because I would improvise at the audition, so sometimes I would return to the original lines, and then when I was on set, I would improvise even more. — Michael Keaton

I applied for a job as the night box office manager of a small theater company in Boystown. The job paid about five dollars an hour for a four-hour shift, so I was surprised to find that it required a lengthy interview with the artistic director of the theater. I had a degree in drama, I explained. We talked (meaning she talked) about playwrights we (she) liked. It was between me and another girl for the job, and she needed to know what I had to offer the Tiny Pretentious Theater Company because "We — Tina Fey

His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him. — Jack London

As morning approaches, body temperature rises, then peaks during the day, dips for a time in early afternoon (when many people take siestas), and begins to drop again in the evening. Thinking is sharpest and memory most accurate when we are at our daily peak in circadian arousal. Try pulling an all - nighter or working an occasional night shift. You'll feel groggiest in the middle of the night but may gain new energy when your normal wake - up time arrives. — David G. Myers

The living and the dead,
The awake and the sleeping,
The young and the old are all one and the same.
When the ones change, they become the others.
When those shift again, they become these again.
God is day and night.
God is winter and summer.
God is war and peace.
God is fertility and famine.
He transforms into many things.
Day and night are one.
Goodness and badness are one.
The beginning and the end of a circle are one. — Heraclitus

From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert... I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace. This kind of thinking infused the second half of my life with a conflicted mentality: Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old... — Cixin Liu

Amy Poehler was new to SNL and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers' room, waiting for the Wednesday night read-through to start. [ ... ] Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table, and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can't remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and loud and "unladylike",
Jimmy Fallon [ ... ] turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, "Stop that! It's not cute! I don't like it."
Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. "I don't fucking care if you like it." Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit.
With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn't there to be cute. She wasn't there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys' scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it. — Tina Fey

Mom's note on the dining room table to me and Faith read:
Daughters of mine,
In case you haven't noticed, no one has seen the top of our dining room table in months. I seem to recall it is oak, but as the days dwindle by, I'm less and less sure. Perhaps this is because your school books, files, papers, magazines, letters, underwear, etc., are shielding it from normal use. My goal for you, dear offspring, to be accomplished in twenty-four hours (no excuses), is the clearing/exhuming of this space so that we may gather around it once again and spend quality time. Even though I am working the night shift, I will still be watching. Do it or die.
Your loving mother — Joan Bauer

So a lot of people who work rotating shifts and they work at night, their bodies are set to want to be awake during the day and sleep at night. So there are some people who have a lot of trouble adjusting their rhythms and they have trouble working the night shift, they're sleepy, they're drowsy driving home. — Shelby Harris

In the darkness with no ember, cold coals bear no flaming tinder. All the shadows, man resemble. In the darkness, wise men tremble. Prodigious foes made thee for pointless sake of prosaic power. Visited upon thyself no vestige of vision by late nights hour. In the stillness of normal eve, in longing for the night's reprieve. In air and earth arise a faint and subtle shift, tis follies gift. With tremulous breath, whisper faintly from thy spirits tower. 'Woe to me!', thy soul says. Cometh nigh, The Rez. — Kel Kade

Toward the voice. The night-shift doctor was heading his way, weaving between the pods, coming for him. Troy clasped his hand over the soreness on his arm. He didn't want to be taken again. — Hugh Howey

Why do you think the lottery is so popular? Do you think anybody would play if the super payoff was a job on the night shift in a meat-packing plant? People play it so if they win they can be rich and idle. Like I told you years ago - if work is so good, how come they have to pay us to do it? — Mike Royko

Oh lordy, the things that night shift gets you to do... We wrapped one of our colleagues up in a shroud and called the porters to pick her up and take her to 'Ward 13.' They were about to put the lid on the trolley when she sat bolt upright and screamed "Don't shut the lid." They bolted and took ages for them to talk to us again... But I still laugh uncontrollably 40 years later!!! — Allie Wilson

The only indication of the passage of time lies in the heavens, the subtle shift of the moon. So Peeta begins pointing it out to me, insisting I acknowledge its progress and sometimes, for just a moment I feel a flicker of hope before the agony of the night engulfs me again. — Suzanne Collins

Only whack jobs apply for the night shift — Rainbow Rowell

Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment." If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn't get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked - until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones - until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. "Well, you can say, 'Everybody knows that,'" said Munger. "I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther." Munger's — Michael Lewis

I had decided that I wanted to earn my living as a writer and the only place in Waterbury where they paid you for writing was at the local newspaper. My opportunity came when the paper had an opening for a night janitor. Opportunities are easy to miss, because they don't always show up in their best clothes. Sometimes opportunities look like beggars in rags. After an eight-hour shift in the shop tossing thirty-pound crates I hustled down to the newspaper building and cleaned toilets, with a vague plan that it would somehow lead to a reporter's position. — John William Tuohy

A 5'5", 182-pound, 43-year-old man wearing khaki shorts and a UCLA sweatshirt runs to Nicolas Cage in a manner he will spend the rest of the night describing to his slightly bored but equally boring date as "ambushing." No one else is on the street and Nicolas Cage is unable to avoid the man, who wants a picture with his "brand new Droid." As the man, who actually seems to be vibrating and hovering in an almost hummingbird-like way, adjusts his stance for the third attempt at a picture his crotch lightly brushes Nicolas Cage's upper thigh, causing his face to shift from "bemused resignation" to, strangely, "serene bliss," for what will become the man's inaugural Facebook profile picture. — Megan Boyle

I haven't been in the same room as you, Erin, when my cock wasn't rock hard and ready to fuck. You know it, too. You know I want to plant it deep inside you. Watch you shift around trying to get used to being crammed so motherfucking tight." His pupils were dilated, chest rising and falling unevenly. Breathtaking man. Burn for me. "I'm hard right now just thinking about what you're hiding under those shorts. I want to lick all of it. I want to bite and fuck it. If you think I can survive this way all day, all night, you have overestimated me. — Tessa Bailey

One Saturday morning walking to the farmers' market with my lover she tells me she needs to look like a man on the street. She hates binding her breasts. Hates having breasts, hates not passing. I press her. I ask her, but what do you feel like when you're naked in bed with me? Do you like your body then? She is quiet. Later she tells me she had a dream. Her mother brought home a bottle of medicine from the hospital for her. The doctor says she has to take it. The medicine is testosterone.

On Shabbat I remember to pray for enough space inside of me to hold all the darkness of the night and all the sunlight of the day. I pray for enough space for transformations as miraculous as the shift from day to night.

Later when that lover has changed his name and an ex-boyfriend has come out to me as a lesbian I go to visit my best friend's sister-turned-brother-turned-sister-again and she tells me about the blessing of having many names and using them all at once. — M.J. Kaufman

We have other opposite problems with circadian rhythms that can happen when you - a lot of times with older adults. They start to go to bed at 6:00, 7:00 at night and they wake up at 2:00 in the morning. And they're rhythms actually shift earlier, but sometime it can just kind of miss the mark and shift too much earlier and that's when we need to treat it with bright light. — Shelby Harris

A clear sunny day can suddenly shift to thunder and lightning, a raging storm can suddenly give way to a bright moonlit night. The weather may be inconstant, but the sky remains the same. The substance of the human mind should also be like this. — Zicheng Hong

I'm an insomniac, my mind works the night shift. — Pete Wentz

People architect new lives all the time. I know this because I never see them again once they find these new lives. They have children or they move to new cities or even just to new neighborhoods or you hate their spouse or their spouse hates you or they start working the night shift or they start training for a marathon or they stop going to bars or they start going to therapy or they realize they don't like you anymore or they die. It happens constantly. It's just me. I haven't built anything new. I'm the one getting left behind. — Jami Attenberg

I like having plans. I like keeping them. Even if said plan is to spend an uninterrupted hour watching Friday Night Lights. If I pass the day excited about solo time on the couch with a glass of wine, pad thai, and Tim Riggins, it's hard to shift gears and muster up enthusiasm for an invitation when it comes my way. — Rachel Bertsche

Twelve years ago you decided what I deserved, and I ended up alone. So this time I will decide what I deserve." Ignoring a twinge of self-consciousness, she faced him and began to undo the front fastenings of her pelisse-robe. "And I deserve this. I deserve you."
His breathing grew labored as he stared at her hands with a searing intensity. "What are you doing, Jane?"
"What does it look like?" She slid out of her gown and let it fall to the floor, leaving her standing before him in only her petticoats, corset, and shift. "I'm seducing you."
Dom's eyes narrowed on her, and she panicked. Was she being too bold? Too shameless?
Too daft?
She was daft, to be standing half-dressed like this in a stable, when all it would take was a groom coming down from his room above to turn this into the most mortifying night of her life. — Sabrina Jeffries

I never really set out to research any of these stories. I try to lead an interesting life though. I guess the closest I came to research was when I applied to work at the state mental institution in Austin, TX. I wanted to work the night shift like Ken Kesey did when he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I thought that might inspire me to write a book that great. — Arthur Bradford

Later that night, when we left the prayer room, we felt something in Upper Room shift. Couldn't explain it, something just felt different. We knew the walls of Upper Room like the walls of our own homes. We'd soft-stepped down hallways as the choir practiced, noticing that corner in front of the instrument closet where the paint had chipped, or the tile in the ladies' room that had been laid crooked. We'd spend decades studying the splotch that looked like an elephant's ear on the ceiling above the water fountain. And we knew the exact spot on the sanctuary carpet where Elise Turner had knelt the night before she killed herself. (The more spiritual of us even swore they could still see the indented curve from her knees.) Sometimes we joked that when we died, we'd all become part of these walls, pressed down flat like wallpaper. — Brit Bennett

Without saying anything, Dara gathered her pillow and one of the soft comforters from her bed and carried it into Carolina's room. Mackenzie and Jennifer followed her. They would sleep in her room that night, keeping the ice packs around her, adjusting the fan. One by one they fixed their make-shift beds on the floor, close to each other, and close to Carolina. — Barbara Casey

I can barely stay awake," Metias had told me after his first night shift. "Does she honestly think we can guard anything after pulling an all-nighter? I was so out of it today that the Colonies' Chancellor himself could've walked into Batalla Hall and I wouldn't have known it. — Marie Lu

Sometimes when she woke from a flabbergasting dream Liz would lie very still to see if she could net it before it fled; perfectly still, eyes closed, not moving her head, as if the slightest shift would tip the story-bearing liquid, break its fragile meniscus and spill the night's elusive catch. — Helen Simpson

It was the middle of the night when they came for me. Even now I can't be sure of the time, whether they waited for me to have been asleep long enough to ensure that I would be super confused if accidentally awakened, or if they had waited until after midnight when my roommate usually headed out for her graveyard shift at the hospital. — Cristina Rayne

In my formative years, I never missed the 'Creature Double Feature' on Saturday afternoon TV, even if it meant switching back and forth between 'Gamera' and the Red Sox. I did a book report on Stephen King's 'Night Shift' in seventh grade. Unrated Italian horror movies became a weekly rite of passage once I hit seventeen. — Chuck Hogan

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. — Liu Cixin

She had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy or th woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seemed to evidence in her very posture.
Then Ada took a step forward, and the other woman did too, and Ada realized that it was herself she was admiring, the mirror having caught the reflection of an opposite mirror on the wall behind her. The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose. She climbed the steps to her room and prepared for bed, but she slept poorly that night, for the music went on until dawn. As she lay awake she thought how odd it had felt to win her own endorsement. — Charles Frazier

There is a story in the book Night Shift, called 'The Mangler,' about a laundry machine that takes on a sort of malignant life. I worked in a laundry for about a year and a half after I got out of college. It was the only job I could find to support my wife and our first child. There was a fellow there that had no hands or forearms. He simply had hooks. This is one of the things that they don't tell you about when you become management. You have to wear a tie. It was this fellow's tie that did him in. — Stephen King

But then one morning when I'd been on night shift, she miscarried suddenly and severely. The doctor said it seemed as though she had provoked it herself. I found that hard to believe, given how much she'd been looking forward to having the baby. At any rate, there were large blue bruises on her abdomen. But it's impossible to know about these things. There are a lot of mixed feelings involved when a woman faces raising an unplanned child on her own. — Jussi Adler-Olsen

We need to fix this. It hasn't been done yet because there's still a reluctance to admit that there was even a problem - anywhere above seven rogue soldiers who got out of control on the night shift. — Janis Karpinski

He hadn't meant to do it. That is to say, he hadn't set out in his car with the /intent/ to kill the janitor. But he /had/ unearthed Sykes's rotation schedule, and he /had/ gotten in his car at the same time that Sykes clocked out of his once-a-week night shift, and he /had/ seen him crossing the road, and he /had/ sped up. — V.E Schwab

I'm not working at the Chevron, although I'd probably be the best person to work the night shift. Look at me. Nobody would try to steal a Snickers on my watch. — Al Jourgensen

Back then, the business depended on bohemians ... They needed Kristofferson and Roger Miller ..It was the tail end of something ... the last Tin Pan Alley ... and we were the night shift! They gave us keys, because they knew the best songs weren't written in daylight ... We got our keys taken away several times ... me and Guy Clark. — Steve Earle

Quick, nervy and jumpy -yet to the children she was as constant as a staff, a tree that can be counted on not to pull up its root and shift in the night. She was the tree that grew in the centre of their lives and in whose shade they lived. — Anita Desai

Because, George thought as she sat there with her eyes closed back before Christmas in Mrs Rock's self-consciously comfortable chair in the counselling office, how can it be that there's an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert?
How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?
She didn't say it out loud, though, because there wasn't a point.
It isn't about saying.
It is about the hole which will form in the roof through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky. — Ali Smith

In my senior year of high school, I was working at a dealership washing cars. For some reason, I asked them to give me a shot as a salesman for a shift. What happened was I sold two cars in one day and they offered me the position. After a while I decided I didn't want the job and so I told the manager I'd contracted HIV from having unprotected sex. It was only half true but I'd been feeling sick and somehow convinced myself I was really dying. I remember I sat in my boss' office, the both of us crying. Later than night he calls my dad and says 'I'm sorry your son has HIV.' It was terrible. — Nick Thune

Esmerine go out briefly to relieve herself, then return and pull off her shift again, her breasts silvery raindrops spilling down her ribs in the moonlight, over Bahram's hands as he warmed them, in that somnolent world of second-watch sex that was one of the beautiful spaces of daily life, the salvation of sleep, the body's dream, so much warmer and more loving than any other part of the day that it was sometimes hard in the mornings to believe it had really happened, that he and Esmerine, so severe in dress and manner, Esmerine who ran the women at their work as hard as Khalid had at his most tryrannical, and who never spoke to Bahram or looked at him except in the most businesslike way, as was only fitting and proper, had in fact been transported together with him to whole other worlds of rapture, in the depths of the night in their bed. As he watched her work in the afternoons, Bahram thought: love changed everything. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Still following the rules, huh?" He grabbed his shift off the back of the kitchen chair and pulled it on.
"Still breaking them?" she fired back. — Robin Bielman

I worked at a hot dog place, a bagel place, the Jersey Store and the hottest fashion joint around. I was getting too famous to work there anymore. I was almost showing up as a joke. I made $2,000 on my show the previous night and I'm going to go shopping during my five-hour shift. — Wale

He looked for a job, and the job that he found was that of an orderly in a hospital, on the night shift, where his work was emptying bed pans, wrapping up dead bodies, and doing all the other things which orderlies have to do.
You never met a more emancipated man. — William Stringfellow

Colors shift like smoke within the branch beneath our feet. Sprites jump from leaf to leaf, leaving sprinklings of glittery dust in the air behind them. Droplets of water are strung like pearls from the silver strands of a spider's web. Bluebottle glow-bugs stick to the leaves and branches, lighting up the night with their blue-green bodies. And high above us, clouds are draped like sashes of color across the sky. Amethyst, azure, jade. — Rachel Morgan