Selected from the Winter 2019 issue of Lapham's Quarterly.
Now and then there came a lull, and a wave of moonlight swept the lake. In a flash it revealed hundreds of boats, steel-dark against lustrous ripples; then it withdrew as if with a furling of vast translucent wings. Charity’s heart throbbed with delight. It was as if all the latent beauty of things had been unveiled to her.
–Edith Wharton, 1917
We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we are conquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplate the dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as they will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will burn out.
–H.M. Tomlinson, 1920
We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel his presence most when his works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night sky, where his worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest his infinitude, his omnipotence, his omnipresence.
–Charlotte Brontë, 1833
No one who is asleep is good for anything, any more than if he were dead, but he of us who has the most regard for life and reason keeps awake as long he can, reserving only so much time for sleep as is expedient for health.
–Plato, 360 BC
The prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.
–Karl Marx, 1867
Night, in these modern times, is like the United States Constitution. It is an admirable institution, but it doesn’t know what is happening beneath it.
–William Hard, 1908
I wonder that the great master who knew everything, when he called sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity.
–Charles Dickens, 1851
Time went quicker in the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as he can guess) to one; and it went, besides, more intensely, so that the gloom of these fancied experiences clouded the day, and he had not shaken off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renew them.
–Robert Louis Stevenson, 1888
’Tis the baleful witching hour, Lo! the moon withdraws her light; Hark! from yonder mould’ring tow’r Screams th’ ill-boding bird of night: Now doth murders dagger gleam, Murder by the Furies led; Now to haunt the villain’s dream, Yawning graves give up their dead. –Elizabeth Carolina Keene, 1762
I suppose some of them have reasons for not going home. Maybe they’re scared of getting hell from their wives or mothers. But I think most of them just hate to go home to bed. It’s kind of like dying, I guess, sleeping is.
–Roaldus Richmond, c. 1940
The night was calm, still, dead.
–Jack Black, c. 1905
The elephant seen in a dream is fear and danger. I have often observed and known that the elephant affrighting one signified sickness, and catching and killing one signified death.
–Artemidorus, c. 200
The wise man learns to know himself as well by the night’s black mantle as the searching beams of day.
–Owen Felltham, 1628
It is only the busy man who is driven to encroach on the hours of darkness.
–Quintilian, c. 95
This impenetrable din contrasts oddly with the sleeping streets, for at that hour none but thieves and poets are awake.
–Louis-Sébastien Mercier, c. 1785
This is the coming earth—here are beauty and death. But to what purpose? Ah, what is the purpose of all these spheres? Read the answer if you can in the starry blue firmament.
–Fridtjof Nansen, 1894
How do you expect the kids to reach for the stars if they can’t see them?
–Forrest Wilder, 2014
A traveler, lost on a desert plain, feels that the recognition of one star, the polestar, is of itself a great acquisition.
–Maria Mitchell, c. 1880
The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was!
–William Shakespeare, c. 1595
Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be. This is why our thoughts, just before we go to sleep, or as we lie awake through the hours of the night, are usually such confusions and perversions of facts as dreams themselves.
–Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851
Wherefore the dreaming life is a worse life than any, and the drowsy or sleepy world is only good for dull, lazy, unprofitable creatures.
–Margaret Cavendish, 1662
We watched and watched, expecting that the crest of fire would rise and give us an increased glow of light and some heat, but it only slid teasingly on the verge of the sea. It seemed as though our world of ice was not yet worthy of the blessings of the sun god. A few minutes after twelve, the light was extinguished, a smoky veil of violet was drawn over the dim outline of the ice, and quickly the stars again twinkled in the Gobelin blue of the sky as they had done, without being outshone, for nearly seventeen hundred hours.
–Frederick A. Cook, 1898
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NIGHT
Winter 2019