nights quotes

But ah! if empty dreams so please, Love give me more such nights as these.

- Robert Herrick
  'The Vision to Electra'.

When awful darkness and silence reign Over the great Gromboolian plain, Through the long, long wintry nights, When the angry breakers roar As they beat on the rocky shore When storm-clouds brood on the towering heights Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore.

- Edward Lear
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and  Alphabets,'The Dong with a Luminous Nose'.

New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic. San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one- trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle. St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.

- Norman Kingsley Mailer
  Miami and the Siege of Chicago,'The Siege of Chicago'.

His English reminds me of tattered washing on the line†of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. 566

- H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
Of President  Warren G Harding. Quoted in Fred Hobson Mencken:  A Life (1994).

   And now the curse has come upon us, because I have personally met in the streets of Ireland persons who are clearly out of Synge's plays. They talk and dress like that, and damn the drink they'll swally but the mug of porter in the long nights after Samhain.

-Cruise
  The Best of Myles.

The people die so, that now it seems theyare fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at 9 at night, all (as they say) that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.

- Samuel Pepys
  Diary entry,12 Aug.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 855

- Francis Thompson
  Poems,'The Hound of Heaven'.