Guy de Maupassant Quotes

There's power in the night. There's terror in the darkness. Despite all our accumulated history, learning, and experience, we remember. We remember times when we were too small to reach the light switch on the wall, and when darkness itself was enough to make us cry out in fear.

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

Fading light means more than just the end of another day. Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood.

Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.

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.

We take it for granted that we can see at all times of day and night. But there was a time, not all that long ago, in the age before electricity, when night brought total darkness - and with it, a not-so-small amount of terror. We get a sense of this when we go camping or when there's a power outage, and our fear of the darkness is primal.

There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Making night hideous.

Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave, Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joyand fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, Swift be thy flight!

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a scream pierced the air'. . . . Good writing takes enormous concentration.

Tonight the sky was utterly black. Perhaps there was no moon tonight—a lunar eclipse, a new moon. A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn't cold.

For in the night, unseen, a single warrior, In sombre harness mailed, Dreaded of man, and surnamed the Destroyer, The rampart wall has scaled. He passed into the chamber of the sleeper, The dark and silent room, And as he entered, darker grew, and deeper, The silence and the gloom.

Riddle me this, riddle me that. Who's afraid of the big black bat?

The night is black, as black as night.

We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm.

The night has a capacity for terror that the day can never match.

...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.

I am the shadow on the moon at night/Filling your dreams to the brim with fright.

Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.

For the night is dark and full of terrors.

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!