58 Dark Quotes On Life

Life is a complex tapestry of light and darkness, each moment intricately woven with experiences that shape who we are. In navigating this intricate journey, we often encounter shadows that challenge and redefine our perspectives. Dark quotes, with their raw honesty and poignant insights, offer a lens through which to explore these deeper, sometimes unsettling aspects of existence. In this collection, we've gathered 58 compelling dark quotes on life that speak to the heart of human experience. These quotes are not just reflections on the darker moments, but also an invitation to embrace the full spectrum of life's emotions, ultimately finding wisdom and strength within.

1. “Life is a beautiful thing. Plant it in the ground, and it blooms into opportunity, capice?” - Gasmaskman

2. “All life is in vain, for Death makes a nonsense of pain.” - Gasmaskman

3. “It is important to correct bad behavior one toe at a time.” - Gasmaskman

4. “Don't worry about it; only worry about how people like her breed.” - Gasmaskman

5. “Falling into ruin was a bit like falling in love: Both descents stripped you bare and left you as you were at your core. And both endings are equally painful.” - J.R. Ward

6. “On the stage Tristen bent over the piano, his fingers swift and sure, his blond hair gleaming under the spotlight. I glanced around at the audience, watching their faces, gratified that they were as captivated as I was by the dark, thunderous song that Tristen conjured.” - Beth Fantaskey

7. “Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.” - Joss Whedon

8. “She stood slim and proud as some medieval witch princess against dawn.” - L.J. Smith

9. “There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.” - Stephen King

10. “Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.” - Stephen King

11. “I lied. I do that, you know, when it suits me. I would have thought you'd realized that by now.” - Anne Stuart

12. “I love those dark moments in Peanuts. I love that they're in there, that Charles Schulz put the sad lonely bits of himself into the comic. I love the silliness too, the dancing Snoopy strips. The little boy Rerun drawing "basement" comics about Tarzan fighting Daffy Duck in a helicopter. Those are the bits that keep me reading. The funny parts! The fun parts. The silly bits that don't make any sense. And when I get to the sad lonely Peppermint Patty standing in a field wondering why nobody shook hands and said "good game," well, it works because that's not all she was. I try to think that way about everything. That's the kind of person I want to be.” - Joey Comeau

13. “People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.” - Tom Stoppard

14. “We may paint our faces. We may fuck around. But pussy-ass bitches here wont be found. My homies stand behind me all the way. My true family and forever we'll stay. Don't fuck with me, cause they got my back. Where do your friends go, when they know you can't hack? Do they stay and help? Fuck no, they run! Back to their mommies while we have our fun. My juggalo family, we don't fuck around. So tell me this now, are you down with the clown?” - Insane Clown Posse

15. “Technically, on the spectrum of very bad things, they did nothing truly wicked. But of course, that spectrum has no measure for the greatest of all carnal sins, the kind that occurs before skin touches skin, before wondering turns to yearning, yearning to having, having to holding for dear life, when two people cling to each other so desperately that even when they lie, inches apart, neither is fully satisfied until the light between them turns to darkness.” - Galt Niederhoffer

16. “What happens when the hitcher and the driver are equally murderous?” - steve aylett

17. “Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.Brown nodded. "I think this is it.” - Stephen King

18. “I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.” - Jess C. Scott

19. “It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.” - Elizabeth Kostova

20. “Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange.” - Samuel Beckett

21. “I survive at the edge of friends circles.” - Holly Black

22. “The more fucked up you are, the more I like you. As long as you've managed to hold onto your identity through all the shit, then it won't matter how twisted you are. I will love you more for it.” - Ashly Lorenzana

23. “Dark, light, dark, light, dark-I swung and missed.” - Daniel Handler

24. “Follow your heart, Ithilnin," Albirich repeated. "Time is precious. Don't waste it living someone else's life.” - Jess C. Scott

25. “Pray as if all things depend on God, and work as if all things depend on you.” - Christina Dodd

26. “He stopped and leaned against a pole and looked up at the deaf and swollen sky. It was a movement of dark shapes, a hurrying, a running. He closed his eyes. ("Hunger")” - Charles Beaumont

27. “The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.” - Dean Koontz

28. “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

29. “This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.” - N.K. Jemisin

30. “All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for?” - C.S. Friedman

31. “Stare at the dark too long and you will eventually see what isn’t there.” - Cameron Jace

32. “Don't let me get into your head. I will twist it and alter it until even you won't recognize yourself. You cannot begin to comprehend the power I possess. I can harm you in any way impossible.” - Troy Bisson

33. “It was darker in the tower than any place Devnee had ever been. The dark had textures, some velvet, some satin. The dark shifted positions.The dark continued to breathe. The breath of the tower lifted her clothing like the flaps of a tent, and sounded in her ears like falling snow.It's the wind coming through the double shutters, Devnee told herself.But how could the wind come through? There were glass windows between the inside and outside shutters.Or were there?The windows weren't just holes in the wall, were they?What if there was no glass? What if things crawled through those open louvers, crept into the room, blew in with the cold that fingered her hair? What creatures of the night could slither through those slats?She had not realized how wonderful glass was, how it protected you and kept you inside.She knew something was out there.” - Caroline B. Cooney

34. “Terri had already gotten her panties into a bunch just from one little phone call, so he knew coming at her too much too fast would be more trouble than it was worth. He couldn’t exactly beat her into submission, not right away anyway. Although he did enjoy seeing her get all riled up. Nothing tugged at a man’s heartstrings like a pair of mascara smeared eyes. Randy from Spring Cleaning-- Coming Summer 2012” - Brandi Salazar

35. “But you still need the two: the dark and the light. You can't see one without the other.” - Julia Green

36. “Which side was I on? There was no time to search for answers. All I could do now was ride on a werewolf's back, toward a destiny as hidden as the dark side of the moon.” - Neal Shusterman

37. “Your diet must be about fifty-fifty, carrots and locoweed," Annie said softly.He froze."I can't figure out what in the name of God's labia majora you think you're doing...but I'm impressed by how well you're doing it in the dark. You must have eyes like a cat.” - Spider Robinson

38. “A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.” - Gillian Flynn

39. “I believe that in a way, sadness is happiness for there can be no wrong without right, no light without dark, no success without failure, no relief without pain, no love without hatred and no Snow White without the evil queen.” - Lisa Cander

40. “Did you follow me here?""Something like that."I let out a frustrated groan. "Can't anyone just talk to me straight? Why is everyone avoiding my damn questions tonight?"Bishop's brows went up. "Okay, fine. Yes, I followed you here. Better?""Yes. Stalkery, but better.""I'm not stalking you.""Spoken like a true stalker” - Michelle Rowen

41. “He was abominable...and the most alluring, tortured soul I'd ever met.” - Becca Fitzpatrick

42. “Mostly, when Jess didn't want to talk about her ideas in class, Colleen thought that Jess was showing off, making sure that she would be coaxed and pleaded with, but how could Jess have explained in a coherent way that she was scared? Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons.” - Helen Oyeyemi

43. “Are you following me?" He asked."Us?" I was the first to speak. "Um, maybe. Hi there. How are you tonight?"He looked at me like I might be a bit crazy.” - Michelle Rowen

44. “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

45. “I didn't know what to say when someone's given you a small free kiss in the dark ...” - Glenda Millard

46. “When you give your heart away, you usually get it back in pieces, fragments. And often, a great deal of time passes before you realize that every piece wasn’t returned to you—and probably never will be. You crave nothing more than to get those small—but vital—fragments back; to return to the unbroken, undamaged version of yourself. But what's been broken cannot be unbroken, and so all you can do is learn to live with the void of the missing pieces, to somehow find beauty in the wreckage.And so I did.Sophie Lenon” - Krystal McLean

47. “There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.” - Terry Pratchett

48. “We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.” - Lauren DeStefano

49. “I’m alone, stumbling through the city in the dark, trying not to let the night freeze my blood.” - Isaac Marion

50. “Suddenly exhausted, she closes her eyes and slips into nightmares again. Graveyards rising out of the ocean. Her friends’ corpses in the light of their burning school. Skeletons ripping open men's chests and crawling inside. She endures it patiently, waiting for the horror film to end and the theater to go dark, those precious few hours of blackout that are her only respite.” - Isaac Marion

51. “Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.” - Jean Baudrillard

52. “I remember the lights turning into blurs of blazing fire. I remember the air-conditioning chilling my arms. The smell of coffee smudging into the smell of eucalyptus.” - Lucy Christopher

53. “I didn’t want the person standing there, beside the bed, to have the same face I’d found so attractive at the airport. But you were there all right: the blue eyes, blondish hair, and tiny scar. Only you didn’t look beautiful this time. Just evil.” - Lucy Christopher

54. “Most people say about graveyards: "Oh, it's just a bunch of dead people. It's creepy." But for me, there's an energy to it that it not creepy, or dark. It has a positive sense to it.” - Tim Burton

55. “The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.” - Nicole Krauss

56. “I don't know why, but there's always the part of you, the part that hides in the shadows protecting the self-destruct button, that doesn't ever want to leave the dark behind.” - Cecilia Ahern

57. “There's not one good thought in that place. There's nothing but waste and want. I can feel his selfish cravings and an abyss of secrets I hope to never know.” - Steve V. Cypert

58. “All right,” she said a little sarcastically. “I was going to assume you liked eating babies and sacrificing virgins, but I might as well ask, what do you do for fun?”“I languish in sin,” I replied in the same tone. “I take my babies rare, and my virgins over easy.” - Nenia Campbell