Diane Ackerman Quotes

The sun was set; the night came on apace, And falling dews bewet around the place; The bat takes airy rounds on leathern wings, And the hoarse owl his woeful dirges sings.

Being a nocturnal creature myself, I often find myself in dark alleys or strange places late at night. If there were werewolves around, I'd be likely to run into them, being the night owl that I am.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil."

Words at night were feral things.

I once went a whole summer without seeing the sun. I would play all night, then sleep all day.

We are what we are. Nothing more, nothing less. There is good and evil among every kind of people. It's the evil among us who rule now.

When evening closes Nature's eye, The glow-worm lights her little spark To captivate her favorite fly And tempt the rover through the dark.

I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin.

Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as legislature.... So people who go to bed to sleep Must count French premiers or sheep, And people who ought to arise from bed Yawn and go back to sleep instead.

Poor people have the blues because they're poor and hungry. Rich people can't sleep at night because they're trying to hold on to their money and everything they have.

From up above, in a plane passing over, you’d just see one little light in all this dark, with no idea of the lives that were being lived within it, and in the house beside, and beside that one. So much happening in the world, night and day, hour by hour. It was no wonder we were meant to sleep, if only to check out of it for a little while.

I think people are screw-ups, and even our greatest heroes are deeply flawed human beings. People make bad decisions for all the wrong reasons, and then somehow they'll do the right thing, and then somehow they'll save somebody, or they'll be compassionate. Horrible people can do wonderful things, and wonderful people can do horrible things.

I tell myself it's a virtue, my failure to sleep in my own house, or at all. I tell myself that I spend more hours than most people aware that I am alive, and that over a lifetime this adds up to more living, more aliveness. I am more alive than the rest of my family. Which is my greatest night fear. Which is why I hunt. I don't ever want to be more alive than they are.

Even if you don't acknowledge it, people die, and guys sleep with girls. That's just how it is.

You lose such a lot of time just sleeping ... when you might just be living! ... It seems such a pity we can't live nights too.

In the description of night in Macbeth, the beetle and the bat detract from the general idea of darkness - inspissated gloom.

It was Night. In most places, Night is a time for sleep, for calm, and for mystery. But not in New York City, where many things conspired every evening to murder the night.

Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale. Light thickens, and the crow Makes wing to th' rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, While night's black agents to their prey do rouse.

What hath night to do with sleep?

I'm kind of a night owl.

I'm very much a night person. Morning is a thing I only experience because I have to.