97 Dark Quotes To Ponder

In a world filled with both light and shadow, we often find ourselves drawn to the depth and mystery that darkness can offer. Dark quotes serve as windows into the more introspective and sometimes unsettling corners of the human psyche. They challenge us to confront our fears, question our beliefs, and explore emotions we might otherwise shy away from. This carefully curated collection of the top 97 dark quotes invites you to ponder the complexities of life, offering unique perspectives that encourage deeper reflection. Whether seeking solace in shared experiences or simply exploring the intriguing nuances of the human condition, these quotes promise to provoke thought and stir the imagination.

1. “Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world.Morning arrives and that's it.Sunlight darkens the earth.” - Charles Wright

2. “That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.” - Ray Bradbury

3. “In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. ” - Alberto Manguel

4. “Yes, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.” - Walter de la Mare

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

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

7. “Hope is the privilege of the weak.” - Gasmaskman

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

9. “Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?What primal night does Man touch with his senses?Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:Love is a war of lightning,and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,and a genital fire, transformed by delight,slips through the narrow channels of bloodto precipitate a nocturnal carnation,to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.” - Pablo Neruda

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

11. “Humanity was a passing notion to him; something he liked to try on for size and model in the dressing room, but never actually felt compelled to buy.” - Jane Bled

12. “The nails from a suicide's coffin, and the skull of the parricide, were of course no trouble; for Vesquit never traveled without these household requisites.” - Aleister Crowley

13. “The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins. It always wins because it is everywhere. It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet. The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.” - Matthew Stover

14. “Don't be afraid of the dark. Shine!” - Vera Nazarian

15. “But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.” - Oscar Wilde

16. “When its dark enough you can see the stars.” - Charles Austin Beard

17. “The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go” - Stephen King

18. “Once again there was the desert, and that only.” - Stephen King

19. “In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).” - Barbara Kingsolver

20. “In Light there is Dark, and in Dark there is Light.” - Kami Garcia

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

22. “Disappear Here.The syringe fills with blood.You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.Wonder if he's for sale.People are afraid to merge. To merge.” - Bret Easton Ellis

23. “I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.” - Oscar Wilde

24. “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

25. “Follow your heart. Just don't get lost.” - Ilsa J. Bick

26. “Like most hearts, it was complicated, shaded with dark and dappled with light.” - kate dicamillo

27. “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

28. “When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground.” - Denis Johnson

29. “And so silence and ...darkness hold happiness and joy?" he said softly."Assuredly," she said, "provided one listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there. Everything.” - Mary Balogh

30. “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

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

32. “I got bored," he says. "Besides, you know what's creepier than walking around your dead brothers' apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.” - Holly Black

33. “If you keep it," Daneca says, "he'll have his claws in you."Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.” - Holly Black

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

35. “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

36. “Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?” - Stephen Crane

37. “My heart, for unknown reasons, seems to freeze in motion in my chest. I can see he senses it and he holds his pause to enjoy my suffering, prolonging my ignorance. “Viktor, what?” - Gwenn Wright

38. “The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.” - Jess C. Scott

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

40. “You may have the dark and cold street life, ruled by the lessor light of the moon. During this time I restore my temple, and later awake to greet the awesome radiance of the sun-star.” - T.F. Hodge

41. “Outside everything was uncannily visible in the light of the full moon, but here in the dark shaded alleys the night was conscious of itself. ("The Moon Slave")” - Barry Pain

42. “Through the darkest hours of the nightand through the dreamers realm I seek,Far beyond the starry skyand beyond galaxies I am free.Through the grimmest memoriesand past a seasons air I cannot breathe,Far beyond this mortal worldin an afterlife we shall meet.” - Lee Argus

43. “No matter how dark the room gets I can always see. It looks emptier when I put the lights on so I don't do it if I can help it. Brightness disagrees with me: it hurts my eyes, wastes electricity and encourages moths, all sorts of things. I sit in the dark for a number of reasons.” - Janice Galloway

44. “All right I think we've been down here in the dark long enough. There's a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand, Constant Reader, and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.” - Stephen King

45. “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

46. “That, dillop brain, is what getting close to the Darke does. It makes you think only of yourself. It takes you away from people you care about. And now you don't have anyone to talk to and it serves you right.” - Angie Sage

47. “Don't think that your first love has to be your only love.” - Yukiru Sugisaki

48. “I could see her will leaving and death seeping through her skin to skewer her soul.” - J.D. Stroube

49. “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

50. “Vengence, betrayal, and love they all are synonyms for the same word: fake.” - TBBishiXO

51. “It is early, early morning. It's that time when it's still dark but you know the day is coming. Blue is bleeding through black. Stars are dying.” - Markus Zusak

52. “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

53. “You will die like a dog for no good reason.” - Ernest Hemingway

54. “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

55. “You're a Dark One," said Anton. "All you see in everything is evil, treachery, trickery.""All I do is not close my eyes to them," Edgar retorted. "And that's why I don't trust Zabulon. I distrust him almost as much as I do Gesar. I can even trust you more—you're just another unfortunate chess piece who happens by chance to be painted a different color from me. Does a white pawn hate a black one? No. Especially if the two pawns have their heads down together over a quiet beer or two.""You know," Anton said in a slightly surprised voice, "I just don't understand how you can carry on living if you see the world like that. I'd just go and hang myself.""So you don't have any counterarguments to offer?"Anton took a gulp of beer too. The wonderful thing about this natural Czech beer was that even if you drank lots of it, it still didn't make your head or your body feel heavy... Or was that an illusion?"Not a single one," Anton admitted. "Right now, this very moment, not a single one. But I'm sure you're wrong. It's just difficult to argue about the colors of the rainbow with a blind man. There's something missing in you... I don't know what exactly. But it's something very important, and without it you're more helpless than a blind man.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

56. “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

57. “It was getting dark by the time I went out, and nobody who knows the country will need to be told how black is the darkness of a November night under high laurel bushes and yew-trees. I walked into the heart of the shrubberies two or three times, not seeing a step before me, till I came out upon the broader carriage-road, where the trees opened a little, and there was a faint grey glimmer of sky visible, under which the great limes and elms stood darkling like ghosts; but it grew black again as I approached the corner where the ruins lay. ("The Open Door")” - Margaret Oliphant

58. “Like a Falcon, she needed the dark to understand who her master was. She would learn to trust him, to rely upon him, to anticipate what he wanted from her. And like any master with his salt, he would reward her for her obedience. He would be exceedingly firm, but he would also be as fair as he could be. He had notchosen the instrument of his revenge at random. He had chosen a beautiful submissive. And what was a submissive if not adaptable -if not a survivor?” - CJ Roberts

59. “As a child, I was afraid of the dark and the monsters on the outside.As a man, I run away from the light, afraid to show the monsters within.” - Anthony Liccione

60. “I feel like a real dead one: having neither blood to bleed nor any flesh or bone to feel the scars; yet I want to hold on to my spirit.” - Munia Khan

61. “Being on the side of the Light is much tougher than being on the side of the Dark...” - Sergei Lukyanenko

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

63. “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

64. “Never give up, Never surrender!!!!! If you think you can't, then you must, if you must, then you can..Tony Robbins” - Paula V. Hardin

65. “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

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

67. “There's something special about her. When she helped me with her touch-""Exactly what was she touching that was so memorable for you?""Watch your mouth.” - Michelle Rowen

68. “Darkness is just light turned inside out.” - Beelzebub

69. “You have to be able to recognize your truths in the daylight before you can find them in the dark.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

70. “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

71. “You don't find light by avoiding the darkness.” - S. Kelley Harrell

72. “You are not wrong. You fought to protect your world. Isn't that good enough? After all, justice in this world is just a bunch of principles made by those with power to suit themselves. No one really thinks of others, you will lose everything if you cannot keep up. Only two kinds of people exist in this world—those who steal and those who are stolen from. So then, today, I just stole your future. That's all.” - Yana Toboso

73. “Flying high in the dark sky, crazy and free, I was happy visiting the worlds and giving death or madness to the people. Either was liberation.” - Lara Biyuts. Vampire Armastus

74. “We walked back the way we came, and even though it was dark there were no lights burning inside the houses. They were like people without hearts; raspberry tarts without the jam.” - Glenda Millard

75. “He was the monster that no one thought to look for in the light of day. It was a common mistake. People often believed they were safer in the light, thinking monsters only came out at night. But safety - like light - is a facade. Underneath, the whole world is drenched in darkness.” - CJ Roberts

76. “But death is stronger than that and when you cover your eyes you are the one who can't see the dark. The dark still sees you.” - Francesca Lia Block

77. “He'll have to do without me, Jamie thought, not looking back. And then clearly, as if he'd been told, he knew Grenville /could/ do without him. There was somewhere else he had to go now, somewhere else he had to be.” - S.E. Hinton

78. “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

79. “Creatures of the Darkness BY VICKI JORDANIt was world of vampires and demons, where innocence was rare and so were the living. It was a world of darkness,where light had been outlawed and nightfall had swallowedus whole. An epic war had been fought, and the creatures of the darkhad finally prevailed over the promoters of the light. Finally,for the first time in existence, the people of the shadows couldcome out and freely walk among one another in the rays of the dying sun, which had once been used to shun them away. A little girl, a child of the light, had survived the battle and crawled out from under the ashes of the destruction. She looked around at her altered world in dismay and confronted a vampireabout the changes, of which she did not approve. “Why did you turn my world into a world of night, and make wrong into a new form of right? How could you make all the light disappear, and with it everyone I once loved so dear? Why are the shadows now the new sun, and why is everything lost what you havewon?” The vampire looked down at the little girl with amusement and delight. “Because, little girl, this is the real world you see, where there’s nolight to shine on false identities. We didn’t destroy the world just to scare; we simply uncovered what was already there. What has come out was all the darkness that was once hidden within, and you’ll soon meet the darkness in you once my fangs pierce your skin.”We are our own greatest fears…..” - Chris Colfer

80. “In the forestlichen writhes and assembles itself into signs to light my path through the deep dark north shadow; and I emerge at last onto a hillside strewn with logogrammatic stones, and scramble away from spruce tops." in the poem "Beyond the Beacon" from Terra Affirmative.” - jay woodman

81. “The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.” - Richard Denney

82. “What about the future?""We'll talk about the future when it gets here.” - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

83. “He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...” - Nelson Algren

84. “There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again.” - Lauren DeStefano

85. “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

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

87. “An ordinary man can enjoy breakfasting on juice and rye bread.But when you are underfed, scorned, miserable or just plain bored, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food.You want something a little more colourful, exciting, tastier, meatier and juicier.” - R.S. Vern

88. “...a passing face together with his grief turned you into a weeping Madonna...” - John Geddes

89. “Whoever lived in that apartment had a security gate, blinds that were closed and curtains drawn. It's probably darker in there than it is in Hollister.” - Cara Lynn Shultz

90. “I didn’t look back, but I knew you were still watching. It probably sounds weird, but I could just feel it. The hairs on my neck bristled when you blinked.” - Lucy Christopher

91. “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

92. “Did you know that darkness has a taste, Grandma?” - Jo Nesbø

93. “Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.” - Stephen King

94. “Laa shay'a waqi'un moutlaq bale kouloun moumkine' -the Wisdom of our Creed is revealed through these words - 'We work in the Dark, to serve the Light. We are Assassins.' --Machiavelli” - Oliver Bowden

95. “Master of the Dark Shadow. For I also, Niniel, had my darkness, in which dear things were lost; but now I have overcome it, I deem.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

96. “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

97. “There might be a million wrong people in your life, but when the right one comes everything looks dark.” - M.F. Moonzajer