John Milton Quotes

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.

Twilight fell: The sky turned to a light, dusky purple littered with tiny silver stars.

The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.

Why is it called 'after dark' when it really is 'after light'?

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.

The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.

the redness had seeped from the day and night was arranging herself around us. Cooling things down, staining and dyeing the evening purple and blue black.

Day, like a weary pilgrim, had reached the western gate of heaven, and Evening stooped down to unloose the latchets of his sandal shoon.

Vast and deep the mountain shadows grew.

The whisper of the dusk is night shedding its husk.

Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour.

Soon evening worked its way into the sky, and the city hunched itself down.

Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.

We stay this way until twilight colours the window and the hour calls me home

... but the longest day hath its evening.

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky

Seeing twilight fall should be prescribed by doctors.

In that dilated moment after sunset when the sky holds all the light.

I'm sure partial to the evening,' Augustus said. 'The evening and the morning. If we just didn't have to have the rest of the dern day I'd be a lot happier.

...So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

The sacred lamp of day Now dipt in Western clouds his parting day.

Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the Dark.