Samuel Rutherford Quotes

Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!

Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light: Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal; Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night.

See, the night doth enfold us! See, all the world lies sleeping!

Midnight brought on the dusky hour Friendliest to sleep and silence.

The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn't silence at all.

Night, having Sleep, the brother of Death.

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

They say in the grave there is peace, and peace and the grave are one and the same.

Sleep: the stepchild of Death.

Time and death sleep side by side.

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

The moon is setand the Pleiades; Middle ofthe night, time passes by,I lie alone.

The moment comes when the great nurse, death, takes a human, the child, by the hand and quietly says, "It is time to go home. Night is coming. It is your bedtime, child of earth. Come; you're tired. Lie down at last in the quiet nursery of nature and sleep. Sleep well. The day is gone. Stars shine in the canopy of eternity."

I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity

Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night.

Amplified by the still of night, the book opened -- a gust of wind.

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born; Relive my languish, and restore the light.

There was no wind; there was no passing shadow on the deep shade of the night; there was no noise. The city lay behind him, lighted here and there, and starry worlds were hidden by the masonry of spire and roof that hardly made out any shapes against the sky. Dark and lonely distance lay around him everywhere, and the clocks were faintly striking two.

The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.

Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.

Composer” is a word which here means “a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.” This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called decomposing.

Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie

Death-counterfeiting sleep.

When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.

Hushed as midnight silence.