Quotes About Darkness

Self-destruction is an act best performed in the dark.

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so in exorable as one's self!

Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.

The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.

Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office.

Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends.

Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that with mine own blood!

evil is the nature of mankind.

That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!

In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creatures.

Life had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along;—and yet it enclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment

En la posterioridad inmediata, la generación siguiente a la de los primeros emigrantes mostró la tonalidad más negra del puritanismo, y de tal manera oscurecía con ella el rostro de la nación, que todos los años siguientes no han sido suficientes para limpiarlo. Tenemos que volver a aprender el arte olvidado de la alegría.

Qué calabozo es más obscuro que el propio corazón? ¿Qué carcelero es más inexorable que uno mismo?

There is no good on earth; and sun is but a name. Come devil; for to thee is this world given.

If it be a sign of mourning, replied Mr. Hooper, I, perhaps, like most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by a black veil.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil.

Long, long may it be, ere he comes again! His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader's step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come

To be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to make the darkness work for him. Ishmael says it best: For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but a disease. In chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck, Melville show us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the seductive power of a great and demented man.

Strange that she'd never known she had such cruelty inside.

Fortune may shine brightly on a woman like that, but the shadow cast is long and dark.