"From this height the sleeping city seems like a child's construction, a model which has refused to be constrained by imagination."
- Ian Rankin, Dead Souls ... See MoreSee Less

"But if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively."
- Alasdair Gray, Lanark ... See MoreSee Less

"The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love."
- Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely ... See MoreSee Less

"It's true, though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night."
- Haruki Murakami, After Dark ... See MoreSee Less

"The Bastille not only overshadowed the capital, but it darkened the hearts of men, for it had been notorious for centuries as the instrument and the emblem of tyranny."
- Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution ... See MoreSee Less

"Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold, oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve."
- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf ... See MoreSee Less

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness ... See MoreSee Less

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together."
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities ... See MoreSee Less

"It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled."
- Charles Dickens, Hard Times ... See MoreSee Less

"At last! I am alone! The only sounds to be heard are the rattling of a few belated and tired-out cabs. For a few hours at least we shall have silence, if not repose."
- Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen ... See MoreSee Less

"He walked on, through a gloomy succession of streets, where the tall, dark houses seemed to close in upon him."
- Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby ... See MoreSee Less

"The street lamp sputtered
The street lamp muttered in the dark."
- T.S. Eliot, Rhapsody on a Windy Night ... See MoreSee Less

"The darkness was so complete that it might have been mahogany."
- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday ... See MoreSee Less

"The silence of the night was profound, and the shadows of the houses seemed to take on strange, fantastic shapes."
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher ... See MoreSee Less

"Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing."
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four ... See MoreSee Less