"Teeming city, city full of dreams, Where spectres in broad day accost the passer-by! Mystery flows everywhere like sap In the narrow channels of the mighty giant."
- Charles Baudelaire, The Seven Old Men ... See MoreSee Less

"A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly in the dripping mist. The public-houses were just closing, and dim men and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors. From some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray ... See MoreSee Less

"Night and day the conquering engines rumbled at their distant work, or, advancing smoothly to their journey’s end, and gliding like tame dragons into the allotted corners grooved out to the inch for their reception, stood bubbling and trembling there."
- Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son ... See MoreSee Less

"I am a dreamer. I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help repeating these moments in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights ... See MoreSee Less

"Darkness could make you forget what was in front of your face. Darkness would swallow the caravan site, the old putting green, and St Rule's Tower. It would swallow crimes and grieving and remorse. If you gave yourself to darkness, you might start to make out shapes invisible to others, but without being able to define them: the movement behind a curtain, the shadows in an alleyway."
- Ian Rankin, Set in Darkness ... See MoreSee Less

"Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infiltrates through all my senses, stifling my recollections and almost destroying my personal identity."
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception ... See MoreSee Less

"It seems like a city built on precipices, a perilous city. Great roads rush down hill like rivers in spate. Great buildings rush up like rockets."
- G.K. Chesterton ... See MoreSee Less

"You misinterpret everything, even the silence."
- Franz Kafka, The Castle ... See MoreSee Less

"You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a grimy tenement in a lane - and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and bright prospects."
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes ... See MoreSee Less

"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