Sometimes it's the darkness that makes the light magical.
Night... time for savouring the silence, melancholy, reflection and loneliness. The passing moments linger on and everything seems to slow down as if time stopped to take a long breath before another day begins. It is the time in between, when yesterday disappeared under the veil of the darkness and tomorrow is still far away in the distant future of a new day.
It is time to step into another world where the darkness shrouds the ordinary streets into a mystery. There is something haunting about a solitary walk along empty alleyways, from deep shadows into flickering light of the streetlamps, where all the footsteps died out and all the voices disappeared in the distance. Where all you can hear is your own heartbeat and where you can get lost in your thoughts, far away from the distractions of the ordinary life.
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.
Margaret Atwood
Night time night time
Day left an hour ago
City light time
Must you get ready so slow
There are places to come from
and places to go
Joni Mitchell
As she walked, clock towers across Prague started arguing midnight, and the long, fraught Monday came at last to a close.
Laini Taylor
Stairway stairway
Down to the crowds in the street
They go their way
Looking for faces to greet
But we run on laughing with no one to meet
Joni Mitchell
Well, it’s a marvellous night for a Moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
‘Neath the cover of October skies
And all the leaves on the trees are falling
To the sound of the breezes that blow
And I’m trying to please to the calling
Of your heart-strings that play soft and low
And all the night’s magic seems to whisper and hush
And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush
One more Moondance with you in the moonlight
On a magic night
Van Morrison
The night walked down the sky with the moon in her hand.
Frederick L. Knowles
I love the silent hour of night,
For blissful dreams may then arise,
Revealing to my charmed sight
What may not bless my waking eyes.
Anne Brontë
White swan of cities, slumbering in thy nest
So wonderfully built among the reeds
Of the lagoon, that fences thee and feeds,
As sayeth thy old historian and thy guest!
White water-lily, cradled and caressed
By ocean streams, and from the silt and weeds
Lifting thy golden filaments and seeds,
Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest!
White phantom city, whose untrodden streets
Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting
Shadows of palaces and strips of sky;
I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets
Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting
In air their unsubstantial masonry.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.
J.R.R. Tolkien
You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything;
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.
Haruki Murakami
Winds in the east
Mist coming in
Like something is brewing
About to begin
Can't put me finger
On what lies in store
But I feel what's to happen
All happened before
Pamela Lyndon Travers
The morning has not yet begun, the lights are low and the darkness prevails. The night tide is silently creeping in. Distant footsteps are echoing in empty streets.
O wild and wondrous midnight,
There is a might in thee
To make the charmed body
Almost like spirit be,
And give it some faint glimpses
Of immortality.
James Russell Lowell
Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
At This Midnight Hour
Midnight is sometimes so empty,
A dark and lonely time.
Yet as the clock now reaches twelve,
I feel your life in mine.
So at this midnight hour
I feel not darkness, but such light
I know that I am not alone,
But always in your sight.
Unknown
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Robert Frost
Night is a world lit by itself.
Antonio Porchia
No matter how dark the night, somehow the sun rises once again and all shadows are chased away.
David Matthew