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compilation of quotes that I like about darkness, the nightime, and the colour black
.
Old people used to call it the Hour of the Wolf.
It's the hour when the most people die, when the most babies are born.
It's the hour when nightmares come to us.
- Vargtimmen, dir. Ingmar Bergman (1968), self-translated
[...] Whom should I turn to,
if not the one whose darkness
is darker than night, the only one
who keeps vigil with no candle,
and is not afraid --
the deep one, whose being I trust
- Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Ich bin derselbe noch, der kniete', Book of Hours, tr. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy
In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next. Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light.
- Rebecca Solnit, 'Flight', The Faraway Nearby
When you live in the dark so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn't that the point?
- Raymond Carver, from Late FragmentI am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
As of she'd fallen in an open grave
he swallowed her at last, and then she wandered
in a dark saturated country where
the red land throbbed with capillaries under
electric stars [...]
- Tony Barstone, Nightmare Kiss (extract)
Stars, hide your fires | Let light not see my black and deep desires.
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 4
But the sap is congealing in the trees. The golden voice of the thrush is coppering. The rose is drooping. The black rust that ruins and ravages and rots is corroding the teeth of the knight’s blade. The darkness is overcoming the light. The graveyard demands its due.
- Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Cré na Cille / Graveyard Clay, self-translated
If I am a witch, then so be it, I said. And I took to eating black things - huitlacoche the corn mushroom, coffee, dark chiles, the bruised part of fruit, the darkest, blackest things to make me hard and strong.
-
Darkness in her abounds, and all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery dimly glistens, and like a lightning flash, her glance illuminates: it is an explosion in the dark.
- Charles Baudelaire, The Desire to Paint (translator?)
In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.
- Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, tr. Thomas Harper & Edward Seidensticker
First there was a god of night and tempest, a black idol without eyes …
- Zbigniew Herbert, ‘From Mythology’, Study of the Object
[Underground places are] forbidden and forbidding. What strikes me is that we've been drawn into the darkness longer than we've been drawn to mountains.
- Robert MacFarlane
Girded with root and rock,
I am cradled in the dark that wombed me
And nurtured in every artery.
- Séamus Heaney, 'Antaeus', North
.
to be continued :)
.
Old people used to call it the Hour of the Wolf.
It's the hour when the most people die, when the most babies are born.
It's the hour when nightmares come to us.
- Vargtimmen, dir. Ingmar Bergman (1968), self-translated
[...] Whom should I turn to,
if not the one whose darkness
is darker than night, the only one
who keeps vigil with no candle,
and is not afraid --
the deep one, whose being I trust
- Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Ich bin derselbe noch, der kniete', Book of Hours, tr. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy
In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next. Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light.
- Rebecca Solnit, 'Flight', The Faraway Nearby
When you live in the dark so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn't that the point?
- Raymond Carver, from Late Fragment
She asked why he always went in black. Black spelt strange constancy of heart, she said. Sometimes when he walked in the garden she had looked from her window and it had seemed to her that she saw a thick smoke walking there, a thick black smoke, though perhaps blue in the autumn air where it was soft beneath the trees. Black was the colour of unsatisfied desire. Black was the colour of the earth, and the earth would never be satisfied, not even when she had gone to bed to it.
- Robert Nye, A Portuguese Person
- Friedrich Nietzsche
As of she'd fallen in an open grave
he swallowed her at last, and then she wandered
in a dark saturated country where
the red land throbbed with capillaries under
electric stars [...]
- Tony Barstone, Nightmare Kiss (extract)
Stars, hide your fires | Let light not see my black and deep desires.
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 4
But the sap is congealing in the trees. The golden voice of the thrush is coppering. The rose is drooping. The black rust that ruins and ravages and rots is corroding the teeth of the knight’s blade. The darkness is overcoming the light. The graveyard demands its due.
- Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Cré na Cille / Graveyard Clay, self-translated
If I am a witch, then so be it, I said. And I took to eating black things - huitlacoche the corn mushroom, coffee, dark chiles, the bruised part of fruit, the darkest, blackest things to make me hard and strong.
-
Darkness in her abounds, and all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery dimly glistens, and like a lightning flash, her glance illuminates: it is an explosion in the dark.
- Charles Baudelaire, The Desire to Paint (translator?)
In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.
- Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, tr. Thomas Harper & Edward Seidensticker
First there was a god of night and tempest, a black idol without eyes …
- Zbigniew Herbert, ‘From Mythology’, Study of the Object
[Underground places are] forbidden and forbidding. What strikes me is that we've been drawn into the darkness longer than we've been drawn to mountains.
- Robert MacFarlane
Girded with root and rock,
I am cradled in the dark that wombed me
And nurtured in every artery.
- Séamus Heaney, 'Antaeus', North
.
to be continued :)
