Evening Quotes

“Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.”
― Poppy Z.Brite

“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, Les Fleurs du Mal

“May your love for me be
like
the scent of the evening sea

drifting in
through a quiet window

so i do not have to run
or chase or fall
... to feel you

all i have to do
is
breathe.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“in the afterglow
of an evening rain

i lay down
in the grass
and think of you

my body aches
like an after-kiss

breaking in soft fires
and wildflowers

my dear,
i will always be
this tender for you.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“Bilbo’s Last Song

Day is ended, dim my eyes,
But journey long before me lies.
Farewell, friends! I hear the call.
The ship's beside the stony wall.
Foam is white and waves are grey;
Beyond the sunset leads my way.
Foam is salt, the wind is free;
I hear the rising of the Sea.

Farewell, friends! The sails are set,
The wind is east, the moorings fret.
Shadows long before me lie,
Beneath the ever-bending sky,
But islands lie behind the Sun
That I shall raise ere all is done;
Lands there are to west of West,
Where night is quiet and sleep is rest.

Guided by the Lonely Star,
Beyond the utmost harbour-bar,
I’ll find the heavens fair and free,
And beaches of the Starlit Sea.
Ship, my ship! I seek the West,
And fields and mountains ever blest.
Farewell to Middle-earth at last.
I see the Star above my mast!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Bilbo's Last Song

“The pale stars were sliding into their places. The whispering of the leaves was almost hushed. All about them it was still and shadowy and sweet. It was that wonderful moment when, for lack of a visible horizon, the not yet darkened world seems infinitely greater—a moment when anything can happen, anything be believed in.”
― Olivia Howard Dunbar, The Shell of Sense

“Fall in love
with the energy
of the mornings

trace your fingers
along the lull
of the afternoons

take the spirit
of the evenings
in your arms
kiss it deeply

and then
make love
to the tranquility
of the nights.”
― Sanober Khan

“There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“my dear, I have nothing to say.
my heart burns
like the evening sky.”
― Sanober Khan

“Although it was only six o'clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter's rough poetry.”
― Théophile Gautier, Hashish, wine, opium

“Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“The evening star

Is the most
beautiful
of all stars”
― Sappho, Sappho

“It is the evening that questions thus from within me.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Evening you gather back
all that dazzling dawn has put asunder:
you gather a lamb, gather a kid,
gather a child to its mother.”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“In this vagueness,
might a novel
of fatigued evenings returning to nights, following
unsuccessful all-day search for life
be written.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“...and the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell wether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we would stay that way forever.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

“I felt very much like a hooker who had just been told she was a lady of the evening.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful ev'ning in.”
― William Cowper, The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper

“As we walk back, it feels like the city is engulfing us. Adrenalin still pours through our veins. Sparks flow through to our fingers. We've still been running in the mornings, but the city's different then. It's filled with hope and with bristles of winter sunshine. In the evening, it's like it dies, waiting to be born again the next morning.”
― Markus Zusak, Fighting Ruben Wolfe

“The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea; she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight.”
― Henry James, The Europeans

“An Evening Air
I go out in the grey evening
In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.

I go out into the hard loneliness of the barren field of grey evening
In 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 lamentation
In the soft fragrant air.
The long rails, grey-dark, smooth as a serpent, shiver, and

A 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

“It looks like something out of Whittier's "Snowbound,"' Julia said. Julia could always think of things like that to say.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown

“Моето слънце пламва у мен, когато падне нощта. Само в този момент започвам да виждам ясно.”
― Edith Piaf, Edith Piaf: 25 chansons

“He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he liked--oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!--the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him.”
― Henry James, The Jolly Corner

“That evening after dinner, I picked lemons from the tree in the backyard, the fruits golden bulbs under the rising moon.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“All that evening Nell sat alone in her bedroom trembling with curious satisfaction. For punishment Eva had been sent to her room without supper and Nell sat listening now to the even, steady sobs far off down the hall. It was dark and on the river shore a night bird tried its note cautiously against the silence. Down in the pantry, the dishes done, Suse and Jessie, dark as night itself, drank coffee by the great stove and mumbled over stories of the old times before the War. Nell fetched her smelling salts and sniffed the frosted stopper of the flowered bottle till the trembling stopped. ("Where The Woodbine Twineth")”
― Davis Grubb, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“Hesperus, you herd
homeward whatever
Dawn's light dispersed”
― Sappho

“The evening stands silent, listening to the murmurs of the night.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Now, in the evening,
a new moon comes.
The hills grow softer.”
― Elizabeth Bishop, North and South

“Regret Roulette by Stewart Stafford

Evening's breath caressed in,
Across a mind's cracked land,
On raven's wing in twilight air,
A doused flame's colder hand.

Dead-end gallery of exit signs,
Contrition's dog whistle song,
Eye of Horus in a looking glass,
Blindfolds of a corrupted throng.

Feral brunch on a sheepish plate,
The curate's egg fried with shell,
Bellini confession, in vino veritas,
Burnt offerings to show-and-tell.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford