40 Inspiring Nighttime Quotes

As the world around us quiets down and the stars begin to twinkle above, the nighttime offers a unique canvas for reflection and introspection. Throughout history, the night has inspired poets, thinkers, and dreamers, serving as a backdrop for creativity and contemplation. In the soft glow of moonlight, some of the most profound thoughts find their voice, and the tranquility of the evening becomes a wellspring of inspiration. In this collection, we have gathered 40 of the most inspiring nighttime quotes that capture the essence of this magical time. Whether you are seeking solace, motivation, or simply a moment of wonder, these words are sure to illuminate your evening journey.

1. “It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores and night owls ... three or four floaters, solitaries, and drunks between benders lean against the sparkly resin counter, sucking the tea from their shtekelehs and working the calulations of their next big mistake.” - Michael Chabon

2. “What hath night to do with sleep?” - John Milton

3. “Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark” - Isaac Bashevis Singer

4. “May night continue to fall upon the orchestra” - André Breton

5. “We sat in the car & the night droppeddown until the only sounds werethe crickets &the dance of our voices& for a momentthe world becamesmall enough toroll back & forth between us.” - Brian Andreas

6. “Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.” - Italo Calvino

7. “I don't need to kill goats to say things. I CAN talk.” - L.J. Smith

8. “If people don't wish to be eaten then they shouldn't taste so nice” - Amy Mah-Vampire

9. “An Evening AirI go out in the grey eveningIn the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.I go out into the hard loneliness of the barren field of grey eveningIn the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.In the gathering darkness a long, swift train suddenly Passes me like a lighting.Hard and ponderous and loud are the wheels.As ponderous as the darkness, and as beautiful.I look on, enchanted, and listen to the sounds of lamentationIn the soft fragrant air.The long rails, grey-dark, smooth as a serpent, shiver, andA soft, low thing cries out in the distance,But the sounds are hard and heavy,In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.” - Samar Sen

10. “Down the hill I went, and then,I forgot the ways of men,For night-scents, heady and damp and coolWakened ecstasy ” - Sara Teasdale

11. “Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.” - Guy de Maupassant

12. “She wanted none of those days to end, and it was always with disappointment that she watched the darkness stride forward. ” - Markus Zusak

13. “On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn’t. Without even noticing what you’re doing, you open up your heart and just start talking to the person next to you—you talk as if you have no audience but the glittering stars, far overhead.” - Banana Yoshimoto

14. “I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” - Sarah Williams

15. “A cool breeze stirred my hair at that moment, as the night wind began to come down from the hills, but it felt like a breath from another world.” - Francis Marion Crawford

16. “Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.” - Roberto Bolaño

17. “Walk with this tomorrow night. If nothing happens, thendon’t come back. Forget about us, this place, but if you feel theNightwalker in you awaken, then return to where you belong.Return to me, and the streets will run red with blood.” - Keith Kekic

18. “From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and here, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque.He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! ("A Tough Tussle")” - Ambrose Bierce

19. “The only true borders lie between day and night, between life and death, between hope and loss.” - Erin Hunter

20. “Will," she said softly, sleepily. "Last night--" You were kind to me, she was going to say. Thank you. The glare from his blue eyes stabbed through her. "There was no last night," he said through his teeth. At that, she sat up straight, almost awake. "Oh, truly? We just went right from one afternoon on through till the next morning? How odd no one else remarked on it. I should think it some miracle, a day with no night--” - Cassandra Clare

21. “Magic of the nights is always much impressive than the magic of the days! ~” - Mehmet Murat ildan

22. “I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.” - Charles Baudelaire

23. “You don't look very happy."Tally tried to smile. David had shared his biggest secret with her; she should tell him hers. But she wasn't brave enough to say the words. "It's been a long night. That's all."He smiled back. "Don't worry, it won't last forever.” - Scott Westerfeld

24. “It's true though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night," the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. "You can't fight it.” - Haruki Murakami

25. “Thanks, Pepe. You've put an extra night into my life. I would have spent it just sleeping like an ox, but I've lived it instead. I'm grateful.” - Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

26. “Por la noche los pensamientos tienen la desagradable costumbre de escapar de su correa y correr libremente.” - Stephen King

27. “A scattering of pinpoint lights shows up in the blackness ahead. A town or village straddling the highway. The indicator on the speedometer begins to lose ground. The man glances in his mirror at the girl, a little anxiously as if this oncoming town were some kind of test to be met. An illuminated road sign flashes by: CAUTION! MAIN STREET AHEAD - SLOW UP The man nods grimly, as if agreeing with that first word. But not in the way it is meant.The lights grow bigger, spread out on either side. Street lights peer out here and there among the trees. The highway suddenly sprouts a plank sidewalk on each side of it. Dark store-windows glide by.With an instinctive gesture, the man dims his lights from blinding platinum to just a pale wash. A lunch-room window drifts by. ("Jane Brown's Body")” - Cornell Woolrich

28. “There was nothing the matter out there. It was in here, with me. I decided I'd better go to work, maybe that would exorcise me. I fled from the room almost as though it were haunted. It was too late to stop off at a breakfast counter now. I didn't want any, anyway. My stomach kept giving little quivers. In the end I didn't go to work, either. I couldn't, I wouldn't have been any good. I telephoned in that I was too ill to come, and it was no idle excuse, even though I was upright on my two legs.I roamed around the rest of the day in the sunshine. Wherever the sunshine was the brightest, I sought and stayed in that place, and when it moved on I moved with it. I couldn't get it bright enough or strong enough. I avoided the shade, I edged away from it, even the slight shade of an awning or of a tree.And yet the sunshine didn't warm me. Where others mopped their brows and moved out of it, I stayed - and remained cold inside. And the shade was winning the battle as the hours lengthened. It outlasted the sun. The sun weakened and died; the shade deepened and spread. Night was coming on, the time of dreams, the enemy. ("Nightmare")” - Cornell Woolrich

29. “Through the night we drove in a tangle of waking and sleeping, nightmares from hell and holy white dreams.” - Glenda Millard

30. “Women can go mad with insomnia.The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird -- a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home.Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one.” - Cathy Ostlere

31. “I hope I never figure out who broke your heart and if I do, if I do. I'd spend all night losing sleep. I'd spend the night and I'd lose my mind. Well I'd spend the night and I'd lose my mind.” - Sara Quin

32. “going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.” - John Green

33. “They said a lot of things to each other that night, but nothing that involved words.” - Michael Grant Fear

34. “Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.” - David Almond

35. “In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization taht the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.” - Dean Koontz

36. “A calm night is open to all the truths.” - Mehmet Murat ildan

37. “POSTNot a head stands out A finger rises Then it is the voice that one knows A signal a brief note A man leaves Up above a cloud that passes by No one goes in And the night keeps its secret” - Pierre Reverdy

38. “When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.” - Khushwant Singh

39. “Uni on varannut heidät itselleenkoko yöksi” - Sapfo

40. “Night is the fatherland of the great inspirations.” - Mehmet Murat ildan