"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities ... See MoreSee Less

"We all live such distant and anonymous lives; disguised, we suffer the fate of strangers. To some, however, this distance between another being and ourselves is never revealed; to others it is revealed only every now and then, through horror or pain, lit by a limitless lightning flash; for yet others it is the one painful constant in their daily lives."
- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet ... See MoreSee Less

"There is a quality to the darkness here that is not merely the absence of light, but a presence in itself - a thick, velvet curtain that holds the breath of centuries."
- Sara Sheridan, The Fair Botanists ... See MoreSee Less

"But this night I was inclined to watch: the procession of weary stars went on, as I looked at them, with slow, solemn march, as if they too felt the influence of the atmosphere, and were as much oppressed by the darkness as I was. The silence of the night was only broken by the occasional ticking of my watch; and once, when a door somewhere in the house was opened and closed, the sound, though it was but a common one, startled me as if it had been the discharge of a gun."
- Charlotte Brontë, The Professor ... See MoreSee Less

"I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses ... See MoreSee Less

"I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other... The night is black."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea ... See MoreSee Less

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
- Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan ... See MoreSee Less

"The streets were dark with something more than night."
- Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder ... See MoreSee Less

"There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn."
- Samuel Johnson ... See MoreSee Less

"From scenes like these, old Scotia’s grandeur springs,
That makes her lov’d at home, rever’d abroad."
- Robert Burns, The Cotter's Saturday Night ... See MoreSee Less

"So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets ... See MoreSee Less

"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels..."
- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ... See MoreSee Less

"The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling."
- The Nameless City, H.P. Lovecraft ... See MoreSee Less

"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 ... See MoreSee Less

"Deeply lost in the night. Just as one sometimes lowers one's head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night."
- Franz Kafka, Diaries ... See MoreSee Less