"The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment." - Djuna Barnes


"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does." - Jorge Luis Borges


"Shadow owes its birth to light." - John Gay


"Night is the mother of counsels." - George Herbert


"Night's deepest gloom is but a calm; that soothes the weary mind: The labored days restoring balm; the comfort of mankind." - Leigh Hunt


"Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o clock is a scoundrel." - Samuel Johnson


"And the night shall be filled with music, and the cares, that infest the day, shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, and as silently steal away." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


"Blemishes are hid by night and every fault forgiven; darkness makes any woman fair." - Ovid


"Shadows fall on even the brightest hours." - Bryan Waller Proctor


"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-Exupery


"Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them." - Seneca


"O comfort-killing night, image of hell, dim register and notary of shame, black stage for tragedies and murders fell, vast sin-concealing chaos, nurse of blame!" - William Shakespeare


"Thank Heaven, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it." - Logan Pearsall Smith


"Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield." - Robert Louis Stevenson


"Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources." - William Trogdon


"Press close bare-bosomed night -- press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds! night of the large few stars! Still nodding night! mad naked summer night." - Walt Whitman


"The Night in Isla Negra

Ancient night and the unruly salt
beat at the walls of my house.
The shadow is all one, the sky
throbs now along with the ocean,
and sky and shadow erupt
in the crash of their vast conflict.
All night long they struggle;
nobody knows the name
of the harsh light that keeps slowly opening
like a languid fruit.
So on the coast comes to light,
out of seething shadow, the harsh dawn,
gnawed at by the moving salt,
swept clean by the mass of night,
bloodstained in its sea-washed crater." - Pablo Neruda