Robert Hayden Quotes

Night wasn't so much falling as sharpening its claws.

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

I tell you naught for your comfort Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

The time for hope is gone, and come for fear.

If I'd had any way of knowing that things were- as Lily Tomlin once said- going to get a whole lot worse before they got worse, I'm not sure how I would have slept that night.

You can't start a fire Worrying 'bout your little world falling apart This gun's for hire Even if we're just dancing in the dark

All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel - or if there was, it was an oncoming train.

I push against the tree and run away, stumbling, the unreal night playing with me, gravity pulling from below, behind, above, making me fall. And I run through a world that is rotating, conscious of the earth's spin, of our planet twirling as it careens through nothingness, of the stars spiraling above, of the uncertainty of everything, even ground, even sky. Mumtaz never calls out, although a thousand and one voices scream in my mind, sing, whisper, taunt me with madness.

There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge.

Running at night used to frighten me. Part of it was simply safety, the question of whether level ground would truly appear under each tentative footstep, and whether the temporary but complete blindness suffered while running toward headlights was, in fact, concealing death.

Remember the words of Chairman Mao: 'It's always darkest before it's totally black.'.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Hell is indefinite.

We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness.

Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

Time plays tricks between here and home," said Mogget sepulchrally, frightening the life out of the telephone operator.

Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.

Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud And goes down burning into the gulf below, No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud At what has happened. Birds, at least must know It is the change to darkness in the sky. Murmuring something quiet in her breast, One bird begins to close a faded eye; Or overtaken too far from his nest, Hurrying low above the grove, some waif Swoops just in time to his remembered tree. At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe! Now let the night be dark for all of me. Let the night be too dark for me to see Into the future. Let what will be, be.

Is it eradicating evil? Or are we like children, left alone in the house at night, who light candle after candle to keep away the darkness. We don't see that the darkness has a purpose — though we may not understand it — and so, in our terror, we end up burning down the house!

The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds, furiously and fast, before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the others, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He often looked back at this, and, more than once, stopped to let it pass over; but, somehow, when he went forward again, it was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.