Darkening Quotes

• Mr Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky; but I will nip him in the bud.

  Boyle Roche

  Air, Sky, Smell

  Attributed

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• Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Life, Cities, Yellow

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2013). “The Great Gatsby”, p.29, Atlântico Press

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• The night is darkening round me, The wild winds coldly blow; But a tyrant spell has bound me, And I cannot, cannot go.

  Emily Bronte

  Blow, Night, Wind

  "The Night is Darkening Round Me". Poem by Emily Bronte, www.poetryfoundation.org. November 1837.

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• The night is darkening round me,
  The wild winds coldly blow;
  But a tyrant spell has bound me
  And I cannot, cannot go.
  The giant trees are bending
  Their bare boughs weighed with snow;
  The storm is fast descending,
  And yet I cannot go.
  Clouds beyond clouds above me,
  Wastes beyond wastes below;
  But nothing drear can move me;
  I will not, cannot go.

  Emily Bronte

  Moving, Night, Blow

  "The Night is Darkening Round Me". Poem by Emily Bronte, www.poetryfoundation.org. November 1837.

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• He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Freedom, Ideas, Light

  Letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug. 1813

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• If NATURE has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea... No one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Creativity, Thinking, Light

  Letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug. 1813

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• He who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Light, Mines, Candle

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• Success and suffering will either darken your heart or make you wise, but they won't leave you where you were.

  Timothy Keller

  Wise, Heart, Suffering

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• In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?

  Salman Rushdie

  Issues, Blood, World Religions

  "Religion, as ever, is the poison in India's blood" by Salman Rushdie, www.theguardian.com. March 8, 2002.

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• Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Love, Life, Marriage

  Martin Luther King (Jr.), Alex Ayres (1993). “The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr”, Plume

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• Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite different to the same face seen on a beach in hard, dry, sunlight, or in a darkening room at twilight, with the shadows of a venetian blind striped across it like a convict’s uniform.

  John Marsden

  Beach, Twilight, Tree

  John Marsden (1998). “Everything I Know About Writing”, p.111, Pan Australia

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• The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, World, Rational

  Theodor W. Adorno (2013). “Aesthetic Theory”, p.27, A&C Black

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• I'm not sure I would label it a 'survivor,'" said Iko, her sensor darkening with disgust. "It looks more like a rotting pumpkin.

  Marissa Meyer

  Survivor, Labels, Looks

  Marissa Meyer (2012). “Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles Book 1)”, p.40, Penguin UK

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• If I were to choose the sights, the sounds, the fragrances I most would want to see and hear and smell--among all the delights of the open world--on a final day on earth, I think I would choose these: the clear, ethereal song of a white-throated sparrow singing at dawn; the smell of pine trees in the heat of the noon; the lonely calling of Canada geese; the sight of a dragon-fly glinting in the sunshine; the voice of a hermit thrush far in a darkening woods at evening; and--most spiritual and moving of sights--the white cathedral of a cumulus cloud floating serenely in the blue of the sky.

  Edwin Way Teale

  Spiritual, Song, Lonely

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• Colours change: in the morning light, red shines out bright and clear and the blues merge into their surroundings, melting into the greens; but by the evening the reds loose their piquancy, embracing a quieter tone and shifting toward the blues in the rainbow. Yellow flowers remain bright, and white ones become luminous, shining like ghostly figures against a darkening green background.

  Rosemary Verey

  Change, Morning, Flower

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• The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable it is alternately stone in you and star.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Stars, Fall, Sunset

  Rainer Maria Rilke, “Evening”

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• In this simple but profound psychological way Scripture tells the history of the fall and of the origin of sin. In this way sin continues still to come into being. It begins with the darkening of the understanding, continues with the excitement of the imagination, stimulates desire in the heart, and culminates in an act of the will

  Herman Bavinck

  Fall, Heart, Simple

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• These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.

  Mark Strand

  Mother, Kissing, Boys

  Mark Strand (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.122, Knopf

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• Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

  Annie Dillard

  Grateful, Past, Light

  "An American Childhood". Book by Annie Dillard, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2009.

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• Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

  Mark Doty

  Animal, Eggs, Two

  Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.100, David R. Godine Publisher

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• I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. and: No one can stop the river of your hands, your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest. You are the trembling of time, which passes between the vertical light and the darkening sky. and: From the stormy archipelagoes I brought my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain, the habitual slowness of natural things: they made up my wild heart.

  Pablo Neruda

  Crazy, Rain, Flower

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• Her sister's shoes. They sparkeled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkeled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood and thorny stars.

  Gregory Maguire

  Stars, Blood, Shoes

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• If you should ask me where I've been all this time I have to say "Things happen." I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth, on the river ruined in its own duration: I know nothing save things the birds have lost, the sea I left behind, or my sister crying. Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock with day? Why the dark night swilling round in our mouths? And why the dead?

  Pablo Neruda

  Dark, Night, Rivers

  Pablo Neruda (1990). “Selected Poems”, p.121, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Flower, Night, Men

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West”, p.153, Vintage

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• I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there... I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity... Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then.

  Richard Brautigan

  Summer, War, Dark

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