Window Lights Quotes & Sayings

He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted. — Neil Gaiman

But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-'
'Like lights in a storm-'
'In the midst of a hurricane,' she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind. — Virginia Woolf

I stared out the window the whole way, because it was raining, which is how I like the city best. It looks like it's been polished up. All the streets shine and lights from everywhere reflect off the black. It's like the whole place has been dipped in sugar syrup. Like the city is some kind of big candy apple. — Carol Rifka Brunt

Open the window of your mind. Allow the fresh air,new lights and new truths to enter. — Amit Ray

At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends. — Italo Calvino

I couldn't tear my eyes from the window, wanting to drink in as much of St. Louis as I could, knowing somewhere out there, one of those infinitesimally small lights was him. I wondered if he'd look up and see the planes crossing the sky like shooting stars, knowing one of those lights was me. — Leah Raeder

You boys know what tropism is, it's what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it - you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can't dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home. — Tobias Wolff

If there was anything that seemed like paradise to me as a kid, it was when I faked my parents into believing I was asleep, but was staring out the window, gazing at the street lights and the wonder of where they could take me. — Michael Martinelli

Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens. — John Darnielle

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that. — Philip K. Dick

Zacharias's study bore the marks of his predecessors, whose taste had run decidedly stoicheiotical. They had had a fondness for skulls with burning lights in their eye sockets, crystal balls in which mysterious shapes came and went, and dark velvet window curtains traced with obscure runes. — Zen Cho

I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it
a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't LIVE in Oz, do you? — Adam Gopnik

Neon lights, moonlight, flickering streetlamps, and shadow through the bedroom window blanket us in an ever-changing quilt. Pearl wraps her arms around my middle and lays her head on my chest. I drink from the bottle of whiskey, both uncomfortable and comforted at the same time. — Logan Ryan Smith

The Roman form of serenade is to race a motorcycle motor under the girl's window, but mufflers are not common in any situation; the only things as dearly loved as a good noise are breakneck speed and eye-splitting lights, preferably neon - all expressions of well-being, like a huge belly-laugh. — Eleanor Clark

Ninth Floor

she ran across the parquet slipped the flokati mat
crashed the window

no

she stood at the window prism looked up at sky bruise night
spread her

no

she tilted dived swanning spinning
tip-toed ink air broke fingers first

no

she climbed the small gap the window gave
hung her finger joints clotted the view with frightened breath
fell ligament torn and sorry

no

she wandered to the glass hatch to watch tranquilised lights sputtering
leaned too hard fell faster than a bottle of Jack

no

this is how it was:

drunk screaming she crashed the parquet with grief
roared the ungiving window frames which gave

she spangled spaghetti-like ribbon-voiced
street lights crashed on her

no.

She did nothing. — Karin Schimke

If you're wired a certain way, you'll always be in morion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I'm not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window. — James Lee Burke

Our story ends happily ever after. It has to. We escape Battle Creek, pile into the car, and burn a strip of rubber down the highway. Fly away west, to the promised land. Our rooms will be lit by lava lamps and Christmas lights. Our lives will glow. Consciousness will rise and minds will expand, and beautiful boys in flannel shirts will make snow angels on our floor and write love letters on our ceiling with black polish and red lipstick. We will be their muses, and they will strum their guitars beneath our window, calling to us with a siren song. Come down come away with me. We will lean out of our tower, our hair swinging like Rapunzel's, and laugh, because nothing will carry us away from each other. — Robin Wasserman

So the crew fly on with no thought that they are in motion. Like night over the sea, they are very far from the earth, from towns, from trees. The clock ticks on. The dials, the radio lamps, the various hands and needles go though their invisible alchemy ... and when the hour is at hand the pilot may glue his forehead to the window with perfect assurance. Out of oblivion the gold has been smelted: there it gleams in the lights of the airport. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by. — Dorianne Laux

And now, at dusk, outside my window, the trees shake their heads like disco dancers in the strobe lights of nightlife long ago. — Martin Amis

Despair was so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannikin in the window. It could be dispelled by the spectacle of lights surrounding a tower. It could be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again. — Anne Rice

The evenings were the worst. I stood at the window of my hotel room and looked at the traffic and the thousands of little lights and the people who all seemed to be on their way to something. — Herman Koch

Live your life in any way, London says. It encourages defiance. I loved what it gave me, who it allowed me to be. On the nights I could afford a minicab home, I rolled down the window while crossing the river and watched the lights on the water, knowing most late-night minicabbers were reaffirming their love of London with the same view. I loved its messiness, its attempts at order. I loved the anonymity it afforded; — Craig Taylor

The moment I stepped out the front door I was faced again with Manhattan. There it was, oh splendid ship of concrete and steel, aluminum, glass and electricity, forging forever up the dark river. (The hudson - like a river of oil, filthy and rich, gleaming with silver lights.) Manhattan at twilight: floating gardens of tender neon, the lavender towers where each window glittered at sundown with reflected incandescence, where each crosstown street became at evening a gash of golden fire, and the endless flow of the endless traffic on the West Side Highway resembled a luminous necklace strung round the island's shoulders. — Edward Abbey

Floating past the Soyuz TV screen, I noticed we were over the Pacific, off the Chilean coast. At the window, I saw few lights: fishing boats, I thought. Then they resolved themselves: the Southern Cross. I was looking at a constellation in the night sky, not the sea! It was a strange delight to be that disconcerted while simultaneously at ease. — Chris Hadfield

The window-lights, myriads and myriads,Bloom from the walls like climbing flowers. — Sara Teasdale

Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window. — Peter F. Drucker

Slowly she surveyed her surroundings and took in the tiny gold lights glinting in every store window and the twin glass elevators decked in red and green bows. A banner hung from the second floor balcony, declaring ONLY SEVEN MORE SHOPPING DAYS TILL XMAS! — Carolyn Keene

It was dark inside the apartment, the lights were dimmed completely and the sky outside the bay window was a starless void. It was as though the apartment itself existed within its own empty, inky black bubble. — Charles Hash

The scar she'd left her was so deep that it may take a thousand million years to heal. She couldn't pretend like nothing had happened. She couldn't shut her feelings, like how you shut a window blind; once you did it, all lights from the outside would be swept away from the room. It had taken her years to acknowledge the fact that she was unwanted; a subject of shame for her mother to sink in. And for sure, it would take her more than nine years to forget it all, in one go. — Diyar Harraz

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. — John Cheever

The end of 'City Lights' makes me cry every time I see it - when Charlie Chaplin walks by the shop window and the once-blind girl brings him a flower and pins it to his lapel. — Emma Stone

The summer I was ten years old, there was a group of kids in my neighborhood who played together every night after dinner. I often watched them from my window ... Every night around nine-thirty or ten, those kids would get called in one by one ... I knew the first ones called were full of resentment. But they needn't have been. Nothing ever happened after they left anyway. Things just sort of ended in a slow motion way, like petals falling off a flower. You couldn't have people leave like that and have anything good happen afterward. Whoever was left couldn't pay much attention to anything other than waiting for their turn to get called in. So, it wasn't so bad to go first, to head back toward those deep yellow lights and beds made up with summer linens. It was much better than being last, when you would be left standing there alone, finally going in without anybody calling you. — Elizabeth Berg

Sasha looked at the windowpane, rinsed continually with rain, smearing lights in the falling dark. She lay with her body tensed, claiming the couch, her spot in this room, her view of the window and the walls, the faint hum that was always there when she listened, and these minutes of Coz's time: another, then another, then one more. — Jennifer Egan

I don't get why people are always trying to escape."

"Really?" said Kate. "Take a look around."

In the distance beyond August's window, the nothing gave way to something - a town, if it could be called a town. It was more like a huddle of ramshackle structures, buildings gathered like fighters with their backs together, looking out on the night. The whole thing had a starved dog look about it. Fluorescent lights cut glaring beams through the darkness.

"I guess it's different for me," he said, his voice taut. "One moment I didn't exist and the next I did, and I spend every day scared I'll just stop beingagain, and every time I slip, every time I go dark, it's harder to come back. It's all I can do to stay where I am. Who I am."

"Wow, August," she said softly. "Way to kill the mood. — Victoria Schwab

A scattering of pinpoint lights shows up in the blackness ahead. A town or village straddling the highway. The indicator on the speedometer begins to lose ground. The man glances in his mirror at the girl, a little anxiously as if this oncoming town were some kind of test to be met.
An illuminated road sign flashes by:
CAUTION!
MAIN STREET AHEAD - SLOW UP
The man nods grimly, as if agreeing with that first word. But not in the way it is meant.
The lights grow bigger, spread out on either side. Street lights peer out here and there among the trees. The highway suddenly sprouts a plank sidewalk on each side of it. Dark store-windows glide by.
With an instinctive gesture, the man dims his lights from blinding platinum to just a pale wash. A lunch-room window drifts by. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

That night she heard the branches tapping against the house and the window frames rattle. She sat alone and thought of the geese, she could hear them out there. It had gotten cold. The wind was blowing their feathers. They lived a long time, ten or fifteen years, they said. The one they had seen on the lawn might still be alive, settled back into the fields with the others, in from the ocean where they went to be safe, the survivors of bloody ambushes. Somewhere in the wet grass, she imagined, lay one of them, dark sodden breast, graceful neck still extended, great wings striving to beat, bloody sounds coming from the holes in its beak. She went around and turned on the lights. The rain was coming down, the sea was crashing, a comrade lay dead in the whirling darkness. — James Salter

What's with the disco lights?" Michael said, rolling down the window between the driver's compartment and the back.
Eve turned around, and her face brightened. "You like it? I thought it looked really cool. I saw it in a movie, you know, in a limo."
"It's cool," Michael said, and smiled at her. She smiled back. "Can't wait to lie here and watch it with you."
Claire said, "You don't have to wait; it's working now. Look
Oh. Never mind." She blushed, feeling stupid that she hadn't gotten that one in the first second. Eve winked at her. — Rachel Caine

In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn't like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream's strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass--a network of lights, flames, stars. — Katha Pollitt

Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up
in a stranger's bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. — Richard Siken

A rap at the back door made her jump, and she peered through the window for a long time before she eased open the door a crack. She left the security chain on. 'What do you want, Richard?'
Richard Morrell's police cruiser was parked in the drive. He hadn't flashed any lights or howled any sirens, so she supposed it wasn't an emergency, exactly. But she knew him well enough to know he didn't pay social visits, at least not to the Glass House.
'Good question,' Richard said. 'I guess I want a nice girl who can cook, likes action movies, and looks good in short skirts. But I'll settle for you taking the chain off the door and letting me in. — Rachel Caine

Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out. — Emily St. John Mandel

I take my old seat by the window and start rapidly boozing. The lights change colors in ways that suggest I'm going too fast, and that is the speed I want to go. — Alissa Nutting

We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story. — Shauna Niequist

A slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the floor; then it sank; then another came, more perceptible. Lights slid right across the uncurtained window. The ship gave a loud melancholy moan. — Virginia Woolf

On the plane leaving Tokyo I'm sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing "Over the Rainbow" straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn't give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don't even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon. — Bret Easton Ellis

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. — Dylan Thomas

Many books mean many windows; many windows mean many new lights! Don't get stuck in one window, one book, one man, one country and one belief! Increase your windows! Wisdom is the house made of only windows! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

We sat on the floor eating donuts, completely dazed and hung over. I looked up at the window every so often to gaze at the Christmas lights. They were so beautiful. They blinked on and off in what should have been the early night dark but was really the early morning dark. — Chrissi Sepe

Slowly, his eyes came up and he looked through the kitchen window and out through the Cahuenga Pass. The lights of Hollywood glimmered in the cut, a mirror reflection of the stars of all galaxies everywhere. He thought about all that was bad out there. A city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all of that and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance.
Bosch nodded and bent down. He closed his eyes, put his hands under the water and brought them up to his face. The water was cold and bracing, as he thought any baptism, the start of any second chance, should be. — Michael Connelly

Somer reclines in her airplane seat, watching through the window as the glimmering lights of Mumbai recede into the darkness of night. In the seat next to her, Asha is already asleep, her head and pillow resting on Somer's lap, her feet in Krishnan's. They should both try to sleep as well, but she knows Krishnan, like her, is reluctant to disturb Asha. He extends his hand to Somer, and she takes it. They rest their interlocking hands on Asha's sleeping body between them, just as they did the first time they made this journey. — Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Despair is so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannekin in the window. It could be dispelled by the lights surrounding a tower. It would be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again. Meaningless, I almost said, aloud. — Anne Rice

The people were all busy in their cars, listening to the radio, so there was no one to smile at, so I just sent my love to the traffic lights. No one ever appreciates them, all day long, working so hard to turn red and yellow and green, right in time with us to make sure we don't crash into each other. If there was any tiny chance, even the tiniest chance, that they happened to be alive, I bet I was the first person ever to tell them they were special. You are special, I said out loud in my car, but in case they couldn't hear, I cracked my window open. "You are special," I said, to the night air.
And just like that, a green light. — Aimee Bender

Anytime I float by a window, I can tell whether the outside is lit or if it's dark outside. When we're working it's just day for us with the lights on inside. — Kevin A. Ford

I let myself feel good for no reason. I let joy happen right there and then, and it's inside me and around me, it's the lights on the road ahead, the clean black of the night, the cold air coming through the window. It's like hearing a song for the first time and being struck by it, haunted by it, wanting to hunt it down and catch it, because the song sums up something you didn't know you wanted to say, giving you chills and goose bumps. But even as you find out what it's called, and you're thinking you'll download it, you've already lost. Because the feeling was right then and there and it's already fading like a dream.
You just have to see those times for what they are: a chance to look down at your life. And when you do, you see it's a skin made up of shiny little moments. — Kirsty Eagar

In your bed tonight, turn off all of the lights and make sure that there is no noise. There is something that you will hear. It is probably that branch slapping the window but you better believe that your mind is going to go to some sick individual tapping on the glass because he wants to get your attention to come to the window for when you do you will be grabbed through it and pulled outside. That happens to me all of the time. — Marcus Dunstan

He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. — Ayn Rand

It partook ... of eternity ... there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures. — Virginia Woolf

And all I can think is that sometimes you're dying, sometimes you're about to explode, sometimes you're 6 feet under and you're searching for a window when someone pours lighter fluid in your hair and lights a match on your face.
I feel my bones ignite. — Tahereh Mafi

The lights have been dimmed and the window is awash in the blackness and he can see a hairline fracture of dawn against the horizon. — Dominic Smith

My cell buzzed midstorm with a text from Soul that said, We are here. See lights in house. No answer at door. NO DOOR. Please advise. Are wet.
I chuckled and texted back, Side gate. Enter through window. To the guys, I said, "Soul's back and she must be human because she can text. And she's not alone, and she's wet. Oh. And she noted that we have no front door."
"She's clearly got mad powers of observation even when she's a dragon," Alex said. — Faith Hunter

Now look, she said, stretched out on the bed, I don't want anything personal, let's just do it, I don't want to get involved, got it? she kicked off her high-heeled shoes ... sure, he said, standing there, let's just pretend that we've already done it, there's nothing less involved than that, is there? what the hell do you mean? she asked. I mean, he said, I'd rather drink anyhow. and he poured himself one. it was a lousy night in Vegas and he walked to the window and looked out at the dumb lights. you a fag? she asked, you a god damned fag? no, he said. you don't have to get shitty, ... — Charles Bukowski

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance. — Nora Ephron

Tell it, Fanny. About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky. Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson about the desire that stir in the heart. Speak like Remy de Gourmont and Dostoevsky and Stevie Crane, like Schopenhauer and Dreiser and Isaiah; speak like all the great questioners whose tongues have wagged and whose hearts have burned with questions. He will listen bewilderedly and, perhaps, only perhaps, understand for a moment the dumb pathos of your eyes. — Ben Hecht

The next thing you do when the plug's pulled, after panicking, is run to the nearest window. You don't know why exactly. It's that better-see-what's-going-on feeling. The world works from the outside in. So if the lights go off, you look outside. — Rick Yancey

Tin Win sat at an open window, his head buried in his hands. She called his name, but he did not react. With a shrill whistle blast, the engine started to move. Su Kyi walked along beside the window. The train picked up speed. The wheezing grew louder and stronger. She started to run. Stumbled. Bowled into a man, jumped over a basket of fruit. Then the platform came to an end. The two rear lights shone like tiger's eyes in the night. Slowly they vanished behind a gentle curve. When Su Kyi turned around the platform was empty. — Jan-Philipp Sendker

I gaze out of the window at the lanes of red taillights streaming towards the hills, the city laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, the view confirming that I was much more alone than I thought, and all those red lights inspired nothing more than a sense that I, too, should be fleeing somewhere. — Chloe Thurlow

Hell, if a neighbour were to stick their head out their window and see a tattooed god ramming a chick in the neighbour's backyard all lit by romantic lights, they'd probably watch. I'd watch too. — Karina Halle