Quotes & Sayings About Working All Night

Margaux looks around the table; this is not working. All of a sudden she's thinking about a safe room, something she's only heard of but suddenly wants: water, oxygen, bulletproof door, dead bolts, a thousand books. Utterly quiet. Completely silent. No girls she barely knows in saggy leather pants, no girls in mesh strippers' gloves and jeans sanded thin as a bee's wing, and no girls who can't stay home one night a year because they are always and forever out. On their way to. Coming from.
And then her heart open. Just a little, but it does. Because she remembers all that. How she felt then: the self-reproach, the utter confusion ... That's why her heart opens. For those girls at the table who always feel baffled and sad, tender and malign, repulsive and desirable, innocent and contemptuous of innocence.
So she cries. For them, mostly. For herself a little ... everything hesitates. So that for a second there's no sound in the enormous room but that of Margaux sobbing. — Ron Koertge

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks. — Dorianne Laux

It wasn't a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who'd never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed ...
... and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city. — Terry Pratchett

Zane rolled his eyes, glad he had come alone. Hell of a negotiator John would be. He would have given the whole damn company away and they'd all have been working for his father, God help them.
"So, how long?" John asked.
"I hope soon. With any luck he 'll have something for me to sign tomorrow. I'm going to hang here tonight, unless we get called in." It wouldn't kill him to sleep under his father's roof for one night, probably. That would also give time for the required show of good faith: the date with Missy.
"So that will be it then, a signed contract and we're good to go?"
"That's it." A signed contract and Zane's bachelorhood, if his father had his way. — Cat Johnson

By contrast, a schoolteacher in North Carolina recounted the story of a sick black woman preparing for death. She gave the teacher her will, plans for a funeral and a grave, and insurance policies, requesting that she look after them. When the teacher asked her if she wanted to see her husband, who had deserted her, she replied, "No, and if you ever hear from him, tell him I don't leave him even a good wish." She then displayed an envelope, containing what she called her most prized possession, and handed it to the teacher for safekeeping. "When I am gone, no one will care about this envelope. Will you promise to keep it, so I will know I am not all gone so soon?" The envelope contained college credits she had accumulated after attending night school while working all day. 2 — Leon F. Litwack

Goodnight, Sam."
Sam took a deep breath and tried to settle himself. It did not good, instead he inhaled a hint of her vanilla perfume mixed with the smell of sea salt. He couldn't help himself. His mind drifted. He longed to buy his face in her neck and breathe it in. Instead he made due with taking deep breathes as the spicy aroma engulfed him.
After a while he realized this wasn't working for him, her signature scent stimulated him and forced him to long for her. He tried counting backwards from a hundred. Maybe that would work to level off his arousal so he could get some sleep. Just lying there thinking about her cologne or the fact that he could simply reach out and touch her body was enough to keep him hard all night. And frustrated...ninety-five, ninety-four, ninety-three. — Carolyn Gibbs

Three a.m. drunks, all over America, were staring at the walls, having finally give it up. You didn't have to be drunk to get hurt, to be zeroed out by a woman; but you could get hurt and become a drunk. You might think for a while, especially when you were young, that luck was with you, and sometimes it was. But there were all manner of averages and laws working that you know nothing about, even as you imagined things were going well. Some night, some hot summer Thursday, night you became the drunk, you were out there alone in a cheap rented room, and no matter how many times you'd been out there before, it was no help, it was even worse because you had got to thinking you wouldn't face it again. All you could do was light another cigarette, pour another drink, check the peeling walls for lips and eyes. What men and women did to each other was beyond comprehension. — Charles Bukowski

We may live in concrete nests piled on top of each other, we may file in and out of our planes and freeways in neat lines, but we are making it all up as we go along. An ant is born into a complex chemical environment where every small instruction had been laid down in advance. Mother tells the workers what to do and they do everything for the greater good of their enormous family.
In contrast, every human being is capable of working for the advancement of their own procreating, their own minuscule families. Yet we somehow recognize the value of a larger form of society, and readily respond to a larger world beyond our own narrow self-interests. With our unique creative capacity, we have modified ourselves as we have modified our physical conditions, and we have developed an extraordinary division of labor. You and I may be as different as night and day, but that is our strength, and it is precisely this diversification that makes my time in Africa so intensely satisfying. — Craig Packer

In the old house in Miami, I'd wake with the feeling of a hand on my chest, my eyes open to the murky blue half-light of my bedroom. Everything quiet, though still feeling noise all around me, though my ears, behind my eyes, under my skin.

In the cottage, I fall asleep slowly, counting the sounds of the night animals - crickets, frogs, squealing raccoons, a cat in heat somewhere beyond the coco plum trees.

But mine is still a loneliness that shakes me from my sleep.

I can forget my solitude all day, through my working hours, through errands, the evening housecleaning ritual I've made up for the cottage.

Yet night remains a tomb, when I'm most vulnerable, lying down for rest without distraction.

Only this body and that darkness, the whispers of the never-ending noche:

You belong to no one. No one belongs to you. — Patricia Engel

Stepparenting is like working at a late-night convenience store - all of the responsibility and none of the authority. — Valerie J. Lewis Coleman

She died."
I had to prompt him.
"Soon after?"
"In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916." I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. "There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital."
"Poor girl."
"All past. All under the sea."
"You make it seem present."
"I do not wish to make you sad."
"The scent of lilac."
"Old man's sentiment. Forgive me."
There was a silence between us. He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way.
"Is this why you never married?"
"The dead live."
The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension.
"How do they live?"
And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke.
"By love. — John Fowles

Albert, I don't know how long we can keep Sam involved at all," she said.
"You're upset," Albert replied.
"Yes, I'm upset. But that's not the point. Sam is out of control. If we're ever going to have a working system we may have to find someone else to play the role of savior."
Albert sighed. "Astrid, we don't know what's out there in the night. And maybe you're right that Sam is out of control. But me? I'm really glad it's him out there getting ready to face whatever it is."
Albert picked up his omnipresent notebook and left.
To a now empty, silent room, Astrid said, "Don't die, Sam. Don't die. — Michael Grant

The rich, being people too, doing all they could to cope with the night sweats and zombie terrors of making fourteen hundred times as much money as the people working for them, made — Kim Stanley Robinson

To awaken each morning with a smile brightening my face; to greet the day with reverence for the opportunities it contains; to approach my work with a clean mind; to hold ever before me, even in the doing of little things, the Ultimate Purpose toward which I am working; to meet men and women with laughter on my lips and love in my heart; to be gentle, kind, and courteous through all the hours; to approach the night with weariness that ever woos sleep and the joy that comes from work well done
this is how I desire to waste wisely my days. — Thomas Dekker

I would roll out of bed and immediately start working, and keep working until it was so late at night that I couldn't stay awake anymore. Then I'd go to sleep and wake up the next morning and do the same thing all over again. I did that every day for three years. — Michael Azerrad

In churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection with representations and ceremonies. It seems to reveal habits which have very little that is charitable about them. An opulent priest is a contradiction. The priest must keep close to the poor. Now, can one come in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a little of that misery, like the dust of labor? Is it possible to imagine a man near a brazier who is not warm? Can one imagine a workman who is working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face? The first proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty. — Victor Hugo

During college, when I was working full time for my father [the decorator Mark Hampton], I rented an apartment and I just couldn't take time off to paint it. So I went there one evening and stayed up all night painting the place what I thought was a lovely pale yellow. When the sun came up, I realized I'd painted the walls the color of insanity. I had to immediately mix in all my trim color to tone it down. Yellow is an electric color and wholly misleading. It becomes more yellow with the sun's yellow light on it. The moral is, even if you think your yellow is the one, go paler. — Alexa Hampton

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

There was a lot of dancing in '76, '78, in the '80s. A lot of dancing. The burn years. A lot of dancing. And for a while, working fit in with all that. 'Moonlighting' - that wasn't acting. It was people telling me 'Let's create a character who is you, so you can play him the way you are. The guy you are at night.' It was fun. — Bruce Willis

Once you've ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right. There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time. — Terry Pratchett

Early next morning, Harry woke with a plan fully formed in his mind, as though his sleeping brain had been working on it all night. — J.K. Rowling

Having it all is just too much hassle. I'm not every-woman. I'm a working woman. And I'm not entirely sure I see the oint of being as dexterous in the kitchen as I am at my desk. If Mr. Y is perfectly satisfied with pre-packaged sushi every night, then far be it from me to raise his hopes with all sorts of homey behavior. The secret, I have discovered, is to manage expectations. If he doesn't expect it, then he's hardly going to be disappointed to discover he may never again eat a home-cooked meal. Or indeed, ever eat again. — Amy Mowafi

I can't sleep in the evenings. Most of the pictures people see of me are me going to work events: a Fendi dinner one night, a Prada dinner the next, and working all day. — Cara Delevingne

My mentor, [Ingmar] Bergman, when we worked on stage, he said you can't convince a thousand people at the big stage where we were working. You can't convince everybody, but just pick one every night that you perform for and make sure that he or she will have an experience that alters their life in a more positive way. So, just one every night. That's worth all the struggle and screaming. — Peter Stormare

Ah," Gary said dreamily. " 'Free time.' I've heard about that. Don't fool yourself, Fire-Top. What with extra hours of lessons for punishments, and the extra work you get every day, free time is an illusion. It's what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight. We all face up to it sooner or later
the only real free time you get here is what my honored sire chooses to give you, when he thinks you have earned it."
"And he doesn't give it to you at night," Alex put in. "He gives it to you when you've been here awhile, on Market Day and sometimes a morning or afternoon all to yourself. But never at night. At night you study. During the day you study. In your sleep
— Tamora Pierce

The trouble is, we have up-close access to women who excel in each individual sphere. With social media and its carefully selected messaging, we see career women killing it, craft moms slaying it, chef moms nailing it, Christian leaders working it. We register their beautiful yards, homemade green chile enchiladas, themed birthday parties, eight-week Bible study series, chore charts, ab routines, "10 Tips for a Happy Marriage," career best practices, volunteer work, and Family Fun Night ideas. We make note of their achievements, cataloging their successes and observing their talents. Then we combine the best of everything we see, every woman we admire in every genre, and conclude: I should be all of that. It is certifiably insane. — Jen Hatmaker

Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because he kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar? — Elie Wiesel

There are some achievements which are never done in the presence of those who hear of them. Catching salmon is one, and working all night is another. — Anthony Trollope

I didn't care for most of the books I was being asked to read in school. I started reading like crazy right after high school when I got a job in a mental hospital. I was working my way through college, and I did a lot of night shifts, and there was nothing to do. So I read like crazy, serious stuff, all the classics. — James Patterson

When it's too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it's too easy you have to worry. If you're not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn't going to, either. I always know that when I get a good night's sleep, the next day I'm not going to get any work done. Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational. — James M. Cain

Tupper, I think in The Victor. Alf was a working class, whippet-thin runner known as the Tough of the Track who won all his races despite having been up all night making briquettes to save a friend's business, missing his bus to the stadium, being knocked over mid-race by a poncy upper-class twit and losing one of his raggedy running shoes. — Douglas Skelton

Seamstresses had been working all night making uniforms for me. As I waited to be fitted, I looked over at a rack of uniforms tagged with the word "Custer" and the name of another actor. I watched a wardrobe man come in and gather up the uniforms, toss them like rags in a corner, and replace them on the rack with blue and gold-braided uniforms marked "Custer" with my name on them. I looked at those uniforms piled up on the floor and said to myself: "That can happen to me some day. — Ronald Reagan

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh. — Stephen King

America already holds the record for freak movements. Now we have a new one. It's called "Restoring Confidence." Rich men who never had a mission in life outside of watching a stock ticker are working day and night "restoring confidence." Writers are working night shifts, speakers' tables are littered up, ministers are preaching statistics, all on "restoring confidence." — Will Rogers

I felt that I didn't want to be in show business anymore. I felt that I wanted to be a farmer. I was milking cows and shoveling terrible stuff and working all day. By the end of the day, all I wanted was my tap shoes - I thought, 'What am I doing? I better get back where I belong on the stage where we work at night and can sleep late! — Gregory Hines

If you think," he began, "that being sober and working steadily broke my bullshit meter, now you know better. I knew you were nailing Cross again from the moment you started back up."
Biting into my taco, I shot him a skeptical look.
"Eva honey, don't you think that if there were another man in New York who could bang it out all night like Cross, I would've found him by now? — Sylvia Day

I used to write at night. I was teaching school, and I was married, and had to do all the things that one does when one is working and has a family. But I used to write at night. — Rudolfo Anaya

There's nothing I'd say that keeps me awake at night, but I think that - when you're working with a group of people that are so beyond talented - that, every day, you wake up going, 'All right, I gotta fight to stay at the same level as these people.' That's what makes it fun. — Brie Larson

As a writer, that moment every few years when I buy a new laptop and find out that all the word processing stuff has slightly changed again (stuff I spend every working day using) is like getting into bed at night and finding some mad robot where you expected your wife to be. — John Niven

How is it?" I ask as we stroll towards the dressing rooms. "Working at the playground. That must be fun."
"Sure, they're just adorable," she says, "For the first five minutes. And then I want to wring their adorable little necks."
I stop, shocked. "I always figured you loved kids."
"Yeah, no." Kayla shakes her head emphatically. "One kid, I can do, even two
just stick them in front of a Disney movie, let them play Xbox all night. But a herd of them?" She shudders. — Abby McDonald

Pretend you're me, she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound.
And it happens just like that.
A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside.
And I'm her.
And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me.
And here I am, my tight, my perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly
right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it's right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette
that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can't catch my breath, my breath. — Megan Abbott

A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to get there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in. — Piper Kerman

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

There was something oddly soothing about working out while the rest of the world was aslep. I slipped in, scanned my membership card, and untangled my headphones from around my iPod. On the most stressful days, I hit the treadmill and ran fo three or four miles. Other days, I did the elliptical or the bike. As long as I was moving, my heart pumping for reasons I could understand, I felt better. So much so that, once all the applications were in and I started sleeping through the night more regularly, I still dragged myself out of bed to work out a couple mornings a week. — Sarah Dessen

As a preacher, I'm working with the crowd, watching the crowd, trying to bring them to that high point at a certain time in the evening. I let everything build up to that moment when they're all in ecstasy. The crowd builds up and you have to watch it that you don't stop it. You start off saying you've heard that tonight's going to be a great night; then you begin the whole pitch and keep it rolling. — Marjoe Gortner

I have heard several people justify working long hours and getting home from work late it night by saying things like, "I have to put in all this time to make up for the vacation we're going to take this summer." I bet if I asked your kids, they'd say that they'd rather have you home every night to play with them than the weeklong summer trip to the lake where you're stressed out the whole time anyways. — Daniel Willey

Human beings don't work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we're too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She has to find them fast because in a few hours she will forget how to count or that she had any kittens at all. I can't sleep in this country because it doesn't shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants - always somebody somewhere working through the night. It never gets done all at once here. Time was different in China. One year lasted as long as my total time here; one evening so long, you could visit your women friends, drink tea, and play cards at each house, and it would still be twilight. It even got boring, nothing to do but fan ourselves. Here midnight comes and the floor's not swept, the ironing's not ready, the money's not made. I would be still young if we lived in China. (1983: 98) — Maxine Hong Kingston

You don't have to settle for the status quo, for being good enough, for getting by, for working all night. — Seth Godin

Coming in from the factory or warehouse, tired enough, there seemed little use for the night except to eat, sleep and then return to the menial job. But there was the typewriter waiting for me in those many old rooms with torn shades and worn rugs, the tub and toilet down the hall, and the feeling in the air of all the losers who had proceeded me. Sometimes the typewriter was there when the job wasn't and the food wasn't and the rent wasn't. Sometimes the typer was in hock. Sometimes there was only the park bench. But at the best of times there was the small room and the machine and the bottle. The sound of the keys, on and on, and shouts: 'HEY! KNOCK THAT OFF, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! WE'RE WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND WE'VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!' With broom sticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines ... — Charles Bukowski

... It's just so' - she frowned, hunting for the right word - 'relentless. You think you're getting on top of it. You scoop up a few villains, get a result or two, make a night of it in the bar, then next morning you wake up and start all over again. It never bloody stops...
She described the pressures from headquarters, and from her own divisional Superintendent. The never-ending demands to beat performance target after performance target. The blizzards of paperwork. The fact that no one really knew what their political masters were after. They claimed to have priorities, lots of priorities, but in the end you got to realise there were so many that absolutely nothing got to the top of the heap. When it came to working out what politicians wanted, really wanted, she'd finally sussed the truth: that they were all equally clueless.
pg 157 — Graham Hurley

All questions of process require an answer that begins with a very important sentence, and the sentence is: 'Everybody is different.' Whatever way of working you name - methodical, haphazard, gets up early in the morning, sleeps all day, works at night, revises immensely, never revises at all - someone has made great work with that way. — Robert Pinsky

If you're working with a band and you really want to work them into the episode, you've got to say to them, "Look, we need you around every day and on Tuesday night all night because we need you to do voices as we're changing stuff." We do the show so quickly, and you just can't get bands to do that. It's not really fair. — Matt Stone

Let me tell you something - staying up all night working on a paper about Malcolm X ain't got shit on staying up all night wondering if you will run out of money. — Alida Nugent

It was in this atmosphere of boozy wistfulness and dizzy exhaustion that Sylvia- along with Carol LeVarn- took her suitcase to the Barbizon roof and tossed each slip, stocking, sheath, and skirt into the night sky. "We took the elevator to the roof," recalls Carol, who refrained from tossing her own clothes off the Barbizon. "We stood there by the empty pool, which was all lit up. We were laughing. All this absurd phony fun we were having was over ... .We were just kind of giddy. I didn't see it as Sylvia throwing off a false self. It was just fun- a 'good-bye to all that' sort of thing. — Elizabeth Winder

I don't really like to write at a desk. I like to write when driving in a car ... Once you're working on it, you're working on it all the time, and sometimes stuff'll come in the middle of the night, in a dream or something. Your mind is working on it all the time. — Paul Simon

Sit down, Lanie, and eat. It's getting cold."
I took two steps into the room, stopped and said quietly but firmly, "I don't have the energy to spar with you tonight. I've been working for five hours and although not physically taxing, it's been mentally draining. I just want a quiet night." I shook my head and amended, "No, I need a quiet night."
"Then it's good we're just gonna watch TV. And when I fuck you later, you're golden. I'll do all the work. — Kristen Ashley

spent a nervous night together. The next morning, the doctors performed a C-section. As they were working, they hit some kind of artery and splashed blood all over the place. I was deathly afraid for my — Chris Kyle

He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed he understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother's love, his brother's ceasless crying: he was alreday forgiving me my shortcomings as a father; he was a distillation of a dozen generations, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the this slip of his ribs. I'd hold him to the window and he's stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through the interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky. — Anthony Doerr

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

How lovely the months, the years with him had been. At the moment I hadn't understood their importance, and now here I was, growing sad. The rain the cold the snow the scents of Spring along the Arno and on the flowering streets of the city, the warmth we gave each other. Choosing a dress, glasses. His pleasure in changing me. And Paris, the exciting trip to a foreign country, the cafes, the politics, the literature, the revolution that would soon arrive, even though the working class was becoming integrated. And him. His room at night. His body. All finished. I tossed nervously in my bed unable to sleep. I'm lying to myself , I thought. Had it really been so wonderful ? I knew very well that at that time, too, there had been shame. And uneasiness, and humiliation, and disgust: accept, submit force yourself. Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to rigorous examination — Elena Ferrante

Were passing by. Once I heard him making fun of Jules. Jules was walking down the street carrying a lamp in his hand that he'd obviously just pulled out of some garbage heap. "Look at the garbage picker man!" Alphonse said. "That motherfucker is sad. He tried to sell me a comforter once! I said get the hell away from me. He's out all night looking for rags and bones. What year we living in, man? Get a real job, motherfucker." Jules couldn't stand Alphonse either. He said Alphonse was a pimp. I didn't know what a pimp did exactly. I was almost certain that it meant he had prostitutes working for him, but I wasn't sure. I told a kid at school that I knew a pimp and he said, "Bullshit. It's not fucking possible. You're making it up." So I guessed I'd made a mistake. Or maybe the word "pimp" had two different meanings. I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING to make older guys want to treat me like I was one of them, — Heather O'Neill

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

A lot of my friends, when I was 14 or 15, they were all up and down, wanting to go out on a Friday night, and my dad had me working really late on Fridays and Saturday mornings and even on Sunday mornings. And when I'd finished all that, we used to spend the rest of the time talking about boxing. — Tyson Fury

He saw that they were all working together at the first step of the species' break from the home world, and he understood that if the first step were taken successfully, with balance, they could run from star to star all across the night. — Kim Stanley Robinson

When I'm by myself I revert to the times when I would forget about eating, stay up all night working, go until I felt an odd sensation I'd identify after some thought as hunger. Then I'd go through the refrigerator like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in whatever there was. Leftovers. — Margaret Atwood

Then Pa looked straight at Laura and said, 'You girls keep away from the camp. When you go walking. don't go near where the men are working, and you be sure you're back here before they come in for the night. There's all kinds of rough men working on the grade and using rough language, and the less you see and hear of them the better. Now remember, Laura. And you too, Carrie.' Pa's face was very serious.
'Yes, Pa' Laura promised, and Carrie almost whispered , 'Yes, Pa.' Carrie's eyes were large and frightened. She did not want to hear rough language, whatever rough language might be. Laura would have liked to hear some, just once, but of course she must obey Pa. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

Working- and Middle-class families sat down at the dinner table every night - the shared meal was the touchstone of good manners. Indeed, that dinner table was the one time when we were all together, every day: parents, grandparents, children, siblings. Rudeness between siblings, or a failure to observe the etiquette of passing dishes to one another, accompanied by "please" and "thank you," was the training ground of behavior, the place where manners began. — Larry McMurtry

Yeah,' said Al. 'I'm very prone to boredom. I gotta go do something. Yeah. That's a fair statement. I'm not the most relaxed person in the world. My mind does not stop working all night.'
'Manipulative?' I said.
'I think you could describe that as leadership,' he said. 'Inspire! I think it's called leadership. — Jon Ronson

Working on music is the funnest thing for me, and I love it, and I could do it all day, all night. — Julian Casablancas

She's here, in front of me. Just my luck. I obsessed about her all night, working out a plan to find her and take her soul. After the disappointment in my kill last night, I knew nothing would satisfy me until I had her.
Only her. — Christine Fonseca

The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. — Thomas Jefferson

That drinking thing, the night before an early morning start, I actually think it helps the productivity in some ways (as long as it's not spirits) it gives you that I don't give a fuck attitude, more relaxed, I'm getting away with it after all, I had a life last night, and now I may be hungover, but I had that secret world that you didn't have, and that you tried to take away from me, want to take away from me. But I still got that beer buzz. And I'll do it again, tomorrow night too. I'll never surrender. And when I'm working, I'll be thinking about it. Those moments of mine, truly mine, that you can never have or take away from me. — Robert Black

If you have a radio, the next three months is a good time to have it quit working. All you will hear from now until the 4th of November will be: 'We must get our government out of the hands of predatory wealth.' 'The good people of this great country are burdened to death with taxes. Now what I intend to do is ... ' What he intends to do is try and get elected. That's all any of them intend to do. Another one that will hum over the old static every night will be: 'This country has reached a crisis in its national existence.' — Will Rogers

I spent all night working on it, and I hope Patrick likes it as much as I do. Especially the second side. I hope it's the kind of second side that he can listen to whenever he drives alone and feel like he belongs to something whenever he's sad. I hope it can be that for him. — Stephen Chbosky

I'm not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can't do that when I'm on a TV show - our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I'll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons - unless I'm actively writing a script for the show I'm working on, in which case there's no time to write fiction at all. — Nick Antosca

We can walk through the darkest night with the radiant conviction that all things work together for the good. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Today is hard because I'm thinking about tomorrow. And I'm thinking about what I've lost. But I had days like this even before Minnie died. Days I just checked out. Gran says it's just the blues. Everybody gets the blues. Maybe that's all they are. But they feel more like grays than blues, and more black than gray sometimes. It's always worse after I've been working too hard, singing night after night, pouring myself out all over the stage so people can lap me up. I love it, the singing, the performing, the people, the music, but sometimes I forget to save something . . . the something that is essentially me, and my light goes out. Sometimes it takes a while to get it burning again... But you have a key, Finn, and I give you permission to come on in," I said. "Even if it's dark, and you don't know what you'll find, you come on in, okay?" I felt an ache in my throat that grew as I spoke. "I want you in here with me, even if it isn't pretty, even if I don't invite you. — Amy Harmon

Like many writers, Hemingway thought of his craft as a trade that he was continually learning and at the mercy of. He told his son Gregory of his own try at writing, "Writing's got to flow and come easy if it's good and this stuff 'smells of the lamp.' You know that old phrase - smells like you've been up all night working on it over a kerosene lamp" (James, — Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

You'll be fine. Just hang on to me. I won't make you let go all night if you don't want to."
She took me up on my offer. Slowly, she slipped her arm around my waist and then clung to me like she was super glued there. I tensed beneath her touch and had to fight back shivers.
"Feel free to hang on to other parts of me too." My voice came out thick because it had been stuck in my throat. "My butt's feeling pretty left out, and I don't spend so much time working out my abs and chest just to never get felt up. — Kelly Oram

It was magic, the oldest magic of all when day became night, gods working in tandem, and I gave it the full benefit of my witness for the singular wonder it was. — J.D. Stanley

If you're a working mom, you're still expected to be a super-mom at home, buy organic food, put dinner on the table every night, and do all the research into preschools. It's really hard. — Joe Swanberg

We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer ... So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day of record in Washington, or close to it ... we went in the night before and opened all the windows ... so that the air conditioning wasn't working inside the room. — Tim Wirth

I'm not one of those people who sits at dinner on their iPhone all night. I'm either working or I'm not. I've gone down that path where you sleep with your phone beside the bed and send an email just before you put your head down and check everything again when you wake up, and I don't like it. — Curtis Stone

To be a liberal is to care about more than one's own belly or roof. It is to care about the rights of all men and women to live and breathe freely. Freely, do you hear me? This is not oppression. Stop saying that black is white and night is day. Freedom is not slavery! So stop with the Orwellian double talk and start working to help more than yourself. Lining your own pockets is the opposite of helping this world! — Robert Peate

I'm standing by the cereal, reaching for a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, when I feel my chest clenching but not unclenching. It clenches tighter and tighter, like someone has wrapped a corset around it. My palms are wet. My head is compressing, growing and shrinking at the same time. I can hear my breathing, and it's so amplified that, to my own ears, I sound like Darth Vader. A woman at the end of the aisle is frozen as she watches me. She looks scared...My breathing is getting louder, and I cover my ears to block it out. And that's when the ceiling starts to spin and the air disappears and my lungs won't stop working and I can't breathe at all. I drop everything and run away from the cart and all that food until I'm out the door. I stand in the parking lot, bent over at the waist, breathing in the fresh night air, and then I lie flat on the ground, as if this will open my lungs wider and make them work again, only the breath won't come. — Jennifer Niven

Against all odds, the Academy had come to feel like home. A slimy, moldy, dungeonlike home without working toilets, maybe, but home nevertheless. He and George had even named the rats that lived behind their walls. Every night, they left Jon Cartwright Jr., III, and IV a piece of stale bread to nibble, in hopes they'd prefer the crumbs to human feet. — Cassandra Clare

There was gray train smoke over the town most days, it smelled of travel, of transcontinental trains about to flash by, of important things about to happen. The train smell sounded the 'A' for Lamptown and then a treble chord of frying hamburger and onions and boiling coffee was struck by Hermann Bauer's kitchen, with a sostenuto of stale beer from Delaney's back door. These were all busy smells and seemed a 6 to 6 smell, a working town's smell, to be exchanged at the last factory whistle for the festival night odors of popcorn, Spearmint chewing gum, barber-shop pomades, and the faint smell of far-off damp cloverfields. Mornings the cloverfields retreated when the first Columbus local roared through the town. Bauer's coffee pot boiled over again, and the factory's night watchmen filed into Delaney's for their morning beer. — Dawn Powell

We're all concerned about the budget. We're all concerned about what's happening financially in our country. There's no question about it. Congress is working day and night. In fact, every time I go home the lights are on at the top of the Capitol. — James F. Amos

My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out. — Jess Walter

Seven years, Dawn. Working with the Slayer. Seeing my friends get more and more powerful ... a witch. A demon. Hell, I could fit Oz in my shaving kit, but come a full moon, he had a wolfy mojo not to be messed with. Powerful, all of them. And I'm the guy who fixes the windows.
They'll never know how tough it is, Dawnie, to be the one who isn't Chosen, to live so near the spotlight and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes because nobody's watching me.
I saw you last night, and I see you working here today. You're not special; you're extraordinary. — Joss Whedon

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. — Ernest Hemingway,

Are you suggesting I'm working with the
zombies? That I paid them to pretend to
attack me so that I'd trick you into letting me join you?""Did you?" Mr. Holland demanded."Yeah, okay," I said in a sugar-sweet tone. "You're right. I was having dinner with Zombie Carl the other night. You know, steaks, rare, and a bottle of vintage type A. He told me all his secrets, but too bad for you I promised him I wouldn't tell. In exchange I asked him to gather his
best undead buddies and stalk me through
my friend's yard. And oh, yeah, it was
totally fine if they wanted to use me as an all-night dinner buffet, because having organs is so last season. — Gena Showalter