Brainstorm

[running_fromthe_past]

“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
― Jean Genet

“Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth...”
― Neil Gaiman,

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
― Mark Twain

"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
― Terry Pratchett

“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills,
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien,

I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.”
― Tana French

“Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky listening to frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more possibilities.”
― Dean Koontz

When walking alone in a jungle of true darkness,
there are three things that can show you the way:
instinct to survive, the knowledge of navigation,
creative imagination. Without them, you are lost.”
― Toba Beta

“Into your darkest corner, you are safe in my love, you are protected.”
― Agapi Stassinopoulos

“You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.”
― Edward Abbey,

“Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.”
― Murasaki Shikibu

“Darkness shields as much as it threatens.”
― R. Scott Bakker

“The night belongs to beasts of prey, and always has. It's easy to forget that when you're indoors, protected by light and solid walls.”
― Cornelia Funke

“What hath night to do with sleep?”
― John Milton

“Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

“On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn’t. Without even noticing what you’re doing, you open up your heart and just start talking to the person next to you—you talk as if you have no audience but the glittering stars, far overhead.”
― Banana Yoshimoto

“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,

I've been looking for it night after night, waiting patiently for it to show up, maybe somewhere in between the state of awake and asleep, alive and not so alive, sober and not so sober.
(I lost track of the difference somewhere in between.)”
-Charlotte Eriksson

“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,

“When darkness falls and eyes stay shut
A chain of voices opens up.
Let wax not wane give breath to death.

p.s. Shhh"
-Yvonne Woon

“Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.”
― David Almond,