c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept.Child abuse will always re-emerge, no matter how many years go by. We read of cases of people who have come forward after thirty or forty years to say they were abused as children in care homes by wardens, schoolteachers, neighbours, fathers, priests. The Catholic Church in the United States in the last decade has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for 'acts of sodomy and depravity towards children', to quote one information-exchange web-site. Why do these ageing people make the abuse public so late in their lives? To seek attention? No, it's because deep down there is a wound they need to bring out into the clean air before it can heal. Many clinicians miss signs of abuse in children because they, as decent people, do not want to find evidence of what Dr Ross suggests is 'a sick society that has grown sicker, and the abuse of children more bizarre'. (Note: this was written in the UK many years before the revelations of Jimmy Savile's widespread abuse, which included some ritual abuse)
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
It’s hard to feel supported when you can’t tell people everything. People haven’t really got a clue what it’s like. It’s hard to trust anyone. It’s hard to believe people won’t let you down. I’m feeling like I want to cry. My body feels hollow. Empty. I don’t feel like I’m 17. I feel young. I’m not sure how old, maybe about 10 yrs. It’s hard to accept that I can’t get all the support I need from one person. From any person. It’s hard that no one can fully understand. It’s hard for me to admit that inside I feel a really lonely person. What do I need to do to take care of myself right now? Well I need to cuddle my teddies — it sounds silly, but I need some comfort... I was still cuddling teddies when I should have been cuddling boys. The sick imagery in my mind, rather than making me sexually active, had closed that door completely.
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
Weird? Absurd? That’s how it seemed to me. I had these forces, these compunctions, these alternative personalities inside me, driving me. It was like being a jack-in-the-box and I was unsure which personality was going to jump out next: Billy, who thought of himself as a cowboy or a terrorist; Kato the cutter; anorexic Shirley, whose only self-indulgence was binge drinking and the occasional salad sandwich. I didn’t dislike Shirley. I was afraid of her. Shirley knew things I didn’t.
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if from a dream, which made the playback of my father and other men abusing me seem I even less real, fantasies conjured up from my imagination, not my memory. Perhaps somebody else’s memory. I didn’t think of myself as having mental-health problems. You don’t at sixteen. I thought of myself as being special, highly strung, moody.
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
There were other strange signals and signs. Another day, suddenly felt an almost overwhelming urge to travel to Balitmore. I wanted to 'kidnap' a helicoper fly it there if I didn't drive the there', she explains. 'I had no idea where I was to go, only that I was certain I would know my destination as I encountered signs and certain landmarks along the way. I was not even certain who I was to meet, or what my mission was, but I felt I must go.' Beginning to heal by this time with Talbon's help, she resisted that urge. Yet she sensed she would be summoned for three more Cat Woman missions: two in 1999 and one in 2000.As for the code words for activating her, those had been erased from Cheryl's conscious memory. Buried deep in her unconscious mind, however, the words, when called up, cause her to react as her programmers want her to. Though she can't remember the activation codes, Cheryl knows her handlers said the same things every time. 'I'm working on unblocking the words in therapy. Once I know what the words are, I can learn how to stop their effect on me. I did it already when I learned the control code. Standing in front of a mirror, I said the control code words over and over until I was completely desensitised to them. That's what I have to do for the activation code words... but I have not been able to recall all of them as yet.' Dr. Talbon was struck by another very important thing. 'It all hung together. The stories Cheryl told - even though it was upsetting to think people could do stuff like that - they were not disjointed. They were not repetitive in terms of "I've heard this before". It was not just trying consciously or unconsciously to get attention. She'd really processed them out and was done with them. She didn't come up with it again [after telling the story once and dealing with it]. Once it was done, it was done. And I think that was probably the biggest factor for me in her believability. I got no sense that she was using these stories to make herself a really interesting person to me so I'd really want to work with her, or something.
— Cheryl Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country
Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as 'fragments', which are 'relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory or carry out a limited task in the person's life. A fragment might be a frightened child who holds the memory of one particular abuse incident.' In complex multiples, Dr Ross continues, the `personalities are relatively full-bodied, complete states capable of a rang of emotions and behaviours.' The alters will have `executive control some substantial amount of time over the person life'. He stresses, and I repeat his emphasis, 'Complex MPD with over 15 alter personalities and complicated amnesic barriers are associated with 100 percent frequency of childhood physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
The programme into which Cheryl was inducted combined all the different ways the intelligence community had learned could cause intense psychological change in adults and children. It had been learned through the use of both knowledgeable and 'unwitting' volunteers. They were subjected to sensory overload, isolation, drugs and hypnosis, all used on bodies that had been weakened from mild hunger. The horror of the programme was that it would be like having an elementary school sex education class conducted by a paedophile rapist. It would have been banned had the American government signed the Helsinki Accords. But, of course, they hadn't. For the test that day and in those that followed, Cheryl Hersha was positioned so she faced a portable movie screen. A 16mm movie projector was on a platform, along with several reels of film. Each was a short pornographic film meant to make her aware of sexuality in a variety of forms...
— Cheryl Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country
To the men and women who changed Cheryl Hersha's life, she was a continuation of the research that had first been conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr. Morton Prince. He encountered a woman named Miss Beauchamp, a nursing student who was referred to the psychiatrist because of health problems. As he worked with her, Prince discovered that she had four separate personalities (dissociated ego states) that existed independently of one another within the same body. Though he tried, Dr. Prince never understood Miss Beauchamp, nor was he able to help her. When he died, his wife had the woman committed to an insane asylum for the rest of her life. However, Prince's careful documentation of Beauchamp's symptoms, actions and family history (extreme child abuse beginning before the age of seven) provided information needed to develop the techniques for contemporary, routinely successful treatment of what would be called Multiple Personality Disorder.
— Lynn Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country
The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the bed had disappeared into my backpack. I’d look inside my books and be shocked to find that the homework had been done. Sometimes it had been done well, at others it was slapdash, the writing careless, my own handwriting but scrawled across the page. As I read the work through, I would get the creepy feeling that someone was watching me. I would turn quickly, trying to catch them out, but the door would be closed. There was never anyone there. Just me. My throat would turn dry. My shoulders would feel numb. The tic in my neck would start dancing as if an insect was burrowing beneath the surface of the skin. The symptoms would intensify into migraines that lasted for days and did not respond to treatment or drugs. The attack would come like a sudden storm, blow itself out of its own accord or unexpectedly vanish. Objects repeatedly went missing: a favourite pen, a cassette, money. They usually turned up, although once the money had gone it had gone for ever and I would find in the chest of drawers a T-shirt I didn’t remember buying, a Depeche Mode cassette I didn’t like, a box of sketching pencils, some Lego.
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle. It was an old factory that had burned to the ground, but the charred ruins of the basement remained. I closed my eyes and could see the black candles, the dancing shadows, the inverted pentagram, the people chanting through hooded robes. I could see myself among other children being abused in ways that defy imagination. I have no doubt now that the cult of devil worshippers was nothing more than a ring of paedophiles, the satanic paraphernalia a cover for their true lusts: the innocent bodies of young children.
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
In my family, you can rot to hell on the inside as long as you’re flawless on the outside, which is really sick, but also hard to unlearn.
— Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl
Why Does He Do That? That's the number one question, isn't it? Maybe it's his drinking, you say. Maybe it's his learning disabilities. It's his job; he hates it. He's stressed. I think he's bipolar. It's his mother's fault; she spoiled him rotten. It's the drugs. If only he didn't use. It's his temper. He's selfish. It's the pornography; he's obsessed. 	The list could go on and on. You could spend many years trying to pinpoint it and never get a definite answer. The fact is, many people have these problems and they aren't abusive. Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn't mean he is abusive. Men hate their jobs all the time and aren't abusive. Bipolar? Okay. Stressed? Who isn't! Do you see where I am going with this? 	Off the subject a bit, when someone commits a violent crime, they always report in the news about his possible motive. As human beings, we need to somehow make sense of things. If someone murders someone, do you think it makes the family of the victim feel better to know the murderer's motive? No. Except for self-defense, there really is no excuse for murder. Motive, if there is any, is irrelevant. 	The same is true of abuse. You could spend your whole life going round and round trying to figure out why. The truth is, the why doesn't matter. There are only two reasons why men commit abuse—because they want to do so and because they can. 	You want to know why. In many ways, you might feel like you need to know. But, if you could come up with a reason or a motive, it wouldn't help you. Maybe you believe that if you did this or that differently, he wouldn't have abused you. That is faulty thinking and won't help you get better. You didn't do anything to cause the abuse. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you didn't deserve to be abused. 	You are the victim and it won't help you to know why he supposedly abused you. No matter what his reason, there is no excuse for abuse. You are not to blame.
— Beth Praed, Domestic Violence: My Freedom from Abuse
Survivors are damaged to different degrees by their experiences. This does not depend on what happened physically. A Survivor who has been raped will not necessarily be more damaged than a Survivor who has been touched. The degree of damage depend on the degree of traumatic sexualization, stigmatization, betrayal and powerlessness, the child has experienced. This in turn depends on a number of factors such as:* who the abuser was;* how many abusers were involved;* if the abuser was same-sex or opposite sex;* what took place;* what was said;* how long the abuse went on for;* How the child felt and how she interpreted what was happening;* if the child was otherwise happy and supported;* how other people reacted to the disclosure or discovery of the abuse;* how old the child was
— Carolyn Ainscough, Breaking Free: Help For Survivors Of Child Sexual Abuse
There was a moment of hesitation in which Joe looked into her eyes, and she looked back without flinching. Many a time, he had been at the same game with her, and she had always crumbled, bowing to his will. Now, he must have realized he was looking into the eyes of a stranger. She was someone he could not recognize, a foreigner inhabiting the body of that old Clairey, the girl he had abused, intimidated, and broken. Clairey decided then and there she would no longer cower before him. It was almost as if she were daring him to strike her in their unspoken exchange.
— Tracy Winegar, Good Ground
You have to teach 'em not to mess with you. You gotta be the big guy don't let him hurt you. If he hits you stand back up and beat the shit out of him.
— Skye Perez
He says, "I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There's a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong and the damage so great. Luminosity--do you understand? It travels across oceans and down generations. They shine with it.
— Emma Brockes, She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me
Cheryl's growing awareness of her emotional difficulties was leading her to research multiple personality. As she had learned more about dissociation, she realised just how severe the abuse had been and how much she had been hurt. Her mind had dissociated to assure survival during the abuse by her father and it had been forced to dissociate by various researchers in government programmes.
— Cheryl Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country
I assumed he knew that your coach was abusing you. I realized in the limo that he didn't."For a moment, there is only silence. When Damien speaks, his words are ice cold. "He knew.
— J. Kenner, Claim Me
That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.
— Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven
The quiet but inexorable breaking down of self-esteem is much more sinister - it’s violation of the soul.
— Rachel Abbott, Only the Innocent
I'd lost myself in the abyss of someone else's tyranny...again.
— Cassandra Giovanni, Love Exactly
Who I am now is who I was before. The three years between, they were the aberration. You wouldn't recognize the person I became during that lost time. I barely do.
— Nora Roberts, Dance Upon the Air
By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states, each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized had to be both extremely intelligent and under the age of seven, two conditions not yet understood though remaining consistent as factors. The trauma was almost always of a sexual nature… (p52)
— Cheryl Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country
Part of the problem was that I couldn't seem to get past the fact that I hadn't tried to escape from Kas. Even in France, when he'd left me on my own for several days, I'd carried on working [as a prostitute] and doing all the things he'd told me to d. And although I knew that it was because of the fear he'd so carefully and deliberately instilled in me, I still felt as though I'd somehow colluded in what had happened to me - despite knowing, deep down, that nothing could have been further from the truth.
— Sophie Hayes, Trafficked: My Story of Surviving, Escaping, and Transcending Abduction Into Prostitution
Each time he came he would twist my defenceless body into a different pose, as if I were his very own doll
— Rachel Abbott, Only the Innocent
The meaning of our lives is to justify where our bosses spent their budget.
— Lisa Schaefer, Budget Justified The Waste Fraud and Abuse of Government Workers
Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children – LLOYD DEMAUSEThe Journal of Psychohistory 21 (4) 1994"Extending these local figures to a national estimate would easily mean tens of thousands of cult victims per year reporting, plus undoubtedly more who do not report.(2) This needn’t mean, of course, that actual Cult abuse is increasing, only that-as with the increase in all child abuse reports-we have become more open to hearing them. But it seemed unlikely that the surge of cult memories could all be made up by patients or implanted by therapists. Therapists are a timid group at best, and the notion that they suddenly begin implanting false memories in tens of thousands of their clients for no apparent reason strained credulity. Certainly no one has presented a shred of evidence for massive “false memory” implantations.
— Lloyd DeMause
No one could leave the group by his or her own volition and put the group at risk of having its secrets revealed.
— Judith Spencer, Satans High Priest
If you have survived an abuser, and you tried to make things right… If you forgave, and you struggled, and even if the expression of your grief and your anger tumbled out at times in too much rage and too many words… If you spent years hanging on to the concepts of faith, hope, and love, even after you knew in your heart that those intangibles, upon which life is formed and sustained, would fail in the end… And especially, if you stood between your children - or anyone - and him, and took the physical, emotional, and spiritual pummeling in their stead, then you are a hero.
— Jenna Brooks
The only reason I haven't shot you yet is because he's the one who should get to do it," I say. "Stay away from him or I'll decide I no longer care.
— Veronica Roth, Divergent
Batterers aren't renowned for taking responsibility for their abusiveness, Sam. They tend to shed blame like a snake molts.
— Stephen White, Private Practices
My point about alcohol is that if you abuse something, it abuses you back.
— Michka Assayas, Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas
Ana was a perpetual victim in a never-ending search for a victimizer.
— Travis Luedke, The Nightlife: Las Vegas
He asks, in a softer voice, "Does your arm still hurt?"You touch it with your hand. The big ache is gone, leaving only the little, underneath ache that will gather and swell against the bone. The blood leaks out of the vein where he grabbed you. But you say, "It's better now.
— Jim Grimsley, Winter Birds
Yes, indeed, I am the stuff, the prize property, the recaptured trophy he will put up on the mantelpiece, in a rage every time I move a millimeter or look less polished, less tarted up than he thinks I should look. In a rage, every time I disappoint him. Which will happen every day.
— Kaimana Wolff, La Chiripa
... Other students lived on campus and got drunk at parties. Other students dated and graduated and got married and led normal lives. She wanted to marry an ex-con and pretend being kidnapped had been a normal thing she could forget about. ...
— Michelle D. Argyle, Pieces
And could you, from a place of love, actually stand up and, use force, to give someone back, the suffering, they were trying to put on you? Would I do it? Maybe it would even be, an act of fierce compassion, as Enso Roshi sometimes talked about, to not take it any more. To not cow down, anymore. To let my father know, the tyrant, the aggressor, that if he hits me, I’m going to hit back, and hard.
— T. Scott McLeod, All That Is Unspoken
Ritual abuse diagnosis research – excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008).Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients’ degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. “In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion.” Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members.
— Randy Noblitt, Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-First Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social, and Political Considerations
When he removed his robes, you could see the hundreds of scars and bruises that shamelessly decorated his body. Huge black bruises, long scars that came from sword lacerations and whips and new wounds that bled fresh red blood.The Dragonboy's father had no idea his son suffered. That's because the boy never
— L'Poni Baldwin, Dragons and Cicadas: The Society On Da Run
Somehow it felt familiar, an old story retold, the claws in my shoulder, my arms twisted behind my back, the drag down the street, Will assisting my father and thinking how much fun it was to hunt someone down. I knew it all. Each snarled command was a line from an old but faithless song. “Pipe down! I’m not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good!
— Kaimana Wolff, La Chiripa
This isn't a romance. You're not a damsel in distress and I'm not the handsome prince come to save you.
— C.J. Roberts, Captive in the Dark
I loved Trevor wholly. In all the good ways that made me feel alive and special and important. But also, in the bad ways. The ways that shut me off from others and left me alone with my pain. The ways that had me keep secrets. I loved Trevor in all the ways that I thought mattered, even though I knew that I didn’t.
— Steph Campbell, Delicate
She had been nothing but a beloved bauble passed from a mother to a son, a decoration of vanity, devoid of identity.
— D. Morgenstern
The problem for me is that I can't ever really see who Gregory is, any more than I can see what a mirror by itself looks like, because he reflects whoever's around him.
— Elizabeth Chandler
Without love, our earth is a tomb
— Robert Browning
There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.
— Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance
Before I met you I WAS BLIND! I see things so differently since we have found each other. I see with eye's of wonder and a heart that is softer. YOU MADE ME! And I can never be what I was because NOW I have become something BETTER than what I was.
— Levon Peter Poe
Love can take one over the clouds, out to space And also to the depths of the Earth where you get trapped and coming back feels like a forgotten dream..
— Luna Marym
It was a thing that could not be articulated or explained. It merely was, like the sunrise or a sheer and sudden drop to the giant water that had stolen my breath, where the land ended in the ruins. My love for Fade strengthened me, made me determined never to give up. I would follow him until the world stopped or until I found him. I believed love hadn’t weakened me or left me soft; instead it made me powerful, determined beyond all belief.
— Ann Aguirre, Outpost
You certainly believe in the power of love. And throughout the series, you see how love shows itself in ways that mirror the best of who we are.
— Moutasem Algharati
With you, I truly am fearless, Marcus. With you, I’m not even afraid to be weak.
— Marina Simcoe, The Real Thing
The return to love is hardly the end of life's adventure.  It's the real beginning.  A course in miracle says we think we have many different problems but we really only have one:  denying love is the only problem and embracing it is the only answer.
— Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"
Love gives you something extra... It makes you limitless...
— Adam Scythe, Immortals
Love is a dramatic driving force, the most powerful potion that we drink willingly.
— Balroop Singh
Helen, you would just have to sit still, close your eyes and think of me, and I would turn the universe inside out to find you. I would go anywhere and fight anything to get to you—witches, dragons, and even pirates. If I have to pass through a hundred lifetimes, I will do it to find you. I may be an old man and you may be an old woman. You may not even recognize me by the time it happens, but you will know and I will know, because nothing can separate us. We will always be together. I promise you. Now stop worrying.
— Linda  Becker, Where There Is Love
With the power of love
—  our two hearts can enlighten the whole world.
Love is the politics of sex
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
Some people use love as a tool to enslave others
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
It made her want to stand up next to him and fight. Fight to stay alive long enough to live out her life next to him. Fight for the only thing she knew that was good enough, noble enough, powerful enough to be, worth risking everything.Love.
— Lauren Kate, Fallen
Six foot six he stood on the groundHe weighed two hundred and thirty-five poundsBut I saw that giant of a man brought downTo his knees by love
— Johnny Cash
A single smile from her could make his entire being burn. One touch from her hand and he was undone. It was terrifying to think of how much power this one person had over him. How one single gesture from her could affect him so profoundly. (Sin thinking about Kat)
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Devil May Cry
Greater than atomic power is the power of love. Alas, we use it so sparingly!
— J.P. Vaswani
Hate controls everything it touches, but love sets everything it touches free.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Did you know that a mind full of malice and hate is able to actually attack another's body and mind? Thus preventing good from taking place (or at least delaying and disrupting the good)? It's true, and we can call it a "psi-attack" or simply an attack from negativism. The way to overcome these forms of attacks is through cultivating a true Positive Soul through the energy of Love. The Love Nature of your Soul is powerful enough to counteract such attacks, because that positive energy forms a blanket around you. Real life isn't much unlike the movies, aside from the fact that in real life, these things truly affect your life immensely, unlike sitting down in a cinema. The vampires of the world are those who can in fact launch massive psi-attacks on whoever they focus their negative energies onto, and for whatever reasons that may be.
— C. JoyBell C.
Nothing is impossible for pure love.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Blood is power, and the heart consumed of one much loved is the most powerful thing of all. After all, what is love if you keep your heart?
— H.M. Ward, Stone Prison
This is night, Diddykins. That's what we call it when it goes all dark like this. 
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
That's the advantage of insomnia. People who go to be early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done
— Banana Yoshimoto, N.P
Night Triumphant- and the Stars Eternal.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin
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, The Handmaid's Tale
I wanted what most people wanted—love, companionship.I wanted someone to touch. I wanted someone to touch me back.I wanted someone to laugh with, someone who would laugh with me, laugh at me.I wanted someone who looked and sawme . Not my power, not my position.I wanted someone to say my name. To call out, “Merit,” when it was time to go, or when we arrived.Someone who wanted to say to someone else, with pride, “I’m here with her. With Merit.”I wanted all those things. Indivisibly.But I didn’t want them from Morgan.
— Chloe Neill, Friday Night Bites
Talon glanced wistfully at his drink as he debated what should take priority. 'Coffee… Daimons… Coffee… Daimons…
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Night Embrace
When I did finally speak, I surprised myself by saying exactly what was on my mind. “You must hate me.”She stared a long time at me.I did,” she said slowly, “But it’s mostly myself I hate.”Don’t,” I said.And why the hell shouldn’t I hate myself? Everybody else hates me.
— Kristin Cast, Untamed
Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.
— Samuel Johnson
Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
all those nights with the phone warming the side of my face like the sun.
— Warsan Shire
Will," she said softly, sleepily. "Last night--" You were kind to me, she was going to say. Thank you. The glare from his blue eyes stabbed through her. "There was no last night," he said through his teeth. At that, she sat up straight, almost awake. "Oh, truly? We just went right from one afternoon on through till the next morning? How odd no one else remarked on it. I should think it some miracle, a day with no night--
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
We love the night and its quiet
—  and there is no night that we love so well as that on which the moon is coffined in clouds.
The sky is already purple; the first few stars have appeared, suddenly, as if someone had thrown a handful of silver across the edge of the world.
— Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth
‎Pleasure is wild and sweet. She likes purple flowers. She loves the sun and the wind and the night sky. She carries a silver bowl full of liquid moonlight. She has a cat named Midnight with stars on his paws. Many people mistrust Pleasure, and even more misunderstand her. For a long time I could barely stand to be in ...the same room with her...
— J. Ruth Gendler, The Book of Qualities
that's because it's from the night, and the night keeps secrets
— Maggie Stiefvater, Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception
People talk about nightfall, or night falling, or dusk falling, and it’s never seemed right to me. Perhaps they once meant befalling. As in night befalls. As in night happens. Perhaps they, whoever they were, thought of a falling sun. That might be it, except that that ought to give us dayfall. Day fell on Rupert the Bear. And we know, if we’ve ever read a book, that day doesn’t fall or rise. It breaks. In books, day breaks, and night falls.In life, night rises from the ground. The day hangs on for as long as it can, bright and eager, absolutely and positively the last guest to leave the party, while the ground darkens, oozing night around your ankles, swallowing for ever that dropped contact lens, making you miss that low catch in the gully on the last ball of the last over.
— Hugh Laurie, The Gun Seller
That's Venus, September thought. She was the goddess of love. It's nice that love comes on first thing in the evening, and goes out last in the morning. Love keeps the light on all night.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
Ithink that theworld should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, justcats andrain, rain and cats, very nice, goodnight.
— Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories
I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.
— Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
I'm hungry for a juicy life. I lean out my window at night and I can taste it out there, just waiting for me.
— Brigid Lowry, Guitar Highway Rose
That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.
— Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes
That night was a dark day. Of course, all nights are dark days, because night is simply a badly lit version of day, ...
— Lemony Snicket
Deep down inside, my heart knew the score.And I know that Haven was wrong.It's not always a case of one loving more than the other.When two people are truly meant to be, they love equally.Differently - but still equal.
— Alyson Noel, Night Star
Aren’t all fairy tales based in fact? You yourself are supposed to be nothing more than a myth.Pandora’s box is a story parents read to their children at night,” she countered. “That means life itself is afairy tale. Like the characters, we all live and love and search for a happily-ever-after.
— Gena Showalter, The Darkest Night
At night the fog was thick and full of light, and sometimes voices.
— Erin Bow, Plain Kate
Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbes and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.
— Brassaï
When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.
— Khushwant Singh, Delhi
Allah causes the night and the day to succeed each other. Truly, in these things is indeed a lesson for those who have insight.
— Anonymous, The Qur'an / القرآن الكريم
We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything--death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.
— Elie Wiesel, Night
May night continue to fall upon the orchestra
— André Breton
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
— John Fowles, The Magus
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.
— Carl Sandburg
A cool breeze stirred my hair at that moment, as the night wind began to come down from the hills, but it felt like a breath from another world.
— Francis Marion Crawford, For the Blood is the Life and Other Stories
No one's place in this world is guaranteed. Not everyone is going to get a happy ending. But life isn't about how it ends. It's about the moments between. It's about the small things. The way our loved ones laugh. The sight of a butterfly in the sunlight after a year or two in the darkness. The love and support of an old friend. They might not be with us in body, but they are with us in spirit. The feeling of something we'd thought lost to us forever returned in a single, life-changing moment. Yes, that is simple, even though it might be momentous to us as individuals. Because every day, on this planet, people are born and people die and stranger things happen. But I know my place now, and my purpose. And no matter what trial you have to endure to find that out...It's worth it.
— Jenny Trout, All Souls' Night
The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air--a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.
— Neil Gaiman, Stardust
When dawn comes, that memory gradually distances...Tonight, I will bring it to sleep with me, so that will not be taken away by the waves of the night...
— Ai Yazawa
On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
— Albert Camus, The Plague
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!from Strophe 21, "Song of Myself
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Soundlessly whispering into the void, my lips moving quickly, silently, without ceasing. Calling his name, calling him to me.Even though there's no use.Even though it's futile.Even though it's way past too late.
— Alyson Noel, Night Star
He stops in his tracks, face expressing major disappointment. "Wait - seriously? That's it? We don't get to do a stealthy tiptoe as we slip around back? No sneaking through a cracked window, or arguing over who gets to crawl through the dogie door to let the other one in?
— Alyson Noel, Night Star
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
— John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Night, which in Autumn seems to fall from the sky so suddenly, chilled us...
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, The Crimson Curtain
I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those darn five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there'd be no night!
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
A lonely night is more profound then lonesome nights.
— Santosh Kalwar
Yet just as the day has two halves, one governed by the sun and the other by the moon, so there are many who are people of the day and who busy themselves with daytime deeds, whilst others are children of the night, their minds consumed with nocturnal notions; but yet there are some in whom the two merge like the rising of the sun and the moon in a day.
— Aino Kallas
By night, I am free. No one hears my monsters but me. My freedom is fragile, though, Because every morning, Over and over, The night is broken by the sun. It’s a good way to die.
— Courtney Cole, Nocte
Although it was only six o'clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter's rough poetry.
— Théophile Gautier, Hashish, Wine, Opium
Isn't it queer that the things we writhe over at night are seldom wicked things? Just humiliating ones.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars
Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes.
— Charles Dickens
O night, O sweetest time, though black of hue,with peace you force all the restless work to end;those who exalt you see and understand,and he is sound of mind who honours you.You cut the thread of tired thoughts, for soyou offer calm in your moist shade; you sendto this low sphere the dreams where we ascendup to the highest, where I long to go.Shadow of death that brings to quiet closeall miseries that plague the heart and soul,for those in pain the last and best of cures;you heal the flesh of its infirmities,dry and our tears and shut away our toil,and free the good from wrath and fretting cares.
— Michelangelo Buonarroti, Complete Poems and Selected Letters
A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
— China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.
— Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
At night the sky is pure astronomy.
— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room
Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.
— Joë Bousquet
The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and this struck her as being true.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
And I start to say, no.Start to ask him to please just take it off and put it away.Start to explain how it holds far too many memories for me.But then I remember what Damen said once about memories - that they're haunting things.And because I refuse to be haunted by mine - I just take a deep breath and smile when I say, "You know, I think it looks really good on you. You should defiantly keep it.
— Alyson Noel, Night Star
Tonight’s going to be one of those things that seem to last forever.
— Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon
The night has a thousand eyesAnd the day but oneYet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun.
— Francis William Bourdillon
The universe dilated within him, above him. Something like joy stirred in Lancaster’s being, a sublime ecstasy born of terror. His heart felt as if it might burst, might leap from his chest. His cheeks were wet. Drops of blood glittered on his bare arms, the backs of his hands, his thighs, his feet. Black as the blackest pearls come undone from a string, the droplets lifted from him, drifted from him like a slow motion comet tail, and floated toward the road, the fields. For the first time in an age he heard nothing but the night sounds of crickets, his own breath. His skull was quiet.
— Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.
— Dan Chaon, Stay Awake
You know those nights where the day has unfolded in such a way that now, in the night, you can feel all the gaps in your body and you can see all the reasons you’re not who you wish you were - you know those nights where the only sound is of you drinking and the people outside who have each other to drink with - those nights when you’re unable to think or be or do because of the paralyzing loneliness - it feels like a hundred of those nights - stitched together and squared - and they come to me in a blush.
— Stefan Golaszewski
Moonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. This world molded in lead, where nothing moved but the wind that fell sometimes like a shadow over the gray forests, and where nothing lived but the scent of the naked earth, was the only world he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.
— Anne Fadiman, At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays
The nearer the dawnthe darker the night.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Night poured itself down my throat. Night was my wine and my meat. Night wed me and bedded me, widowed me and murdered me and resurrected me whole a thousand times over with each hour.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance