Darkness and light - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and how dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.

- Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

Night, the Mother of Fear and Mystery, was coming upon me.

- H. G.Wells, TheWar of theWorlds (1898)

Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy. Strange that in this light, in which even the dearest love is frostily assessed, and even the possible defeat of our half-waking world is contemplated without remission of praise, the human crisis does not lose but gains significance. Strange, that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness.

- Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)

History had, without question, been changed. Darkness would not fall.

- L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall (1939)

With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on one arm and turned his eyes toward the blood-curdling blackness of the window. Through it shone the Stars! Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye - Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world. [. . .] On the horizon outside the window, in the direction of Saro City, a crimson glow began growing, strengthening in brightness, that was not the glow of a sun. The long night had come again.

- Isaac Asimov, ''Nightfall'' (1941)

My night is your day.

- Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast (film, 1946), translated by Francis Howard (1946)

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Even here, Martin Ashley thought, so far from home, the night still came.

- Chad Oliver, ''Rite of Passage'' (1954)

''Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,'' said Gimli. ''Maybe,'' said Elrond, ''but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.''

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

The night belonged to me and my droogs and all the rest of the nadsats, and the starry bourgeois lurked indoors drinking in the gloopy worldcasts.

- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

There is no place bereft of the light, the comfort and radiance of the creator spirit. There is no place that is outcast, outlawed, forsaken. There is no place left dark.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Stars Below'' (1974)

To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it - what greater gift?

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The New Atlantis'' (1975)

Now theworld has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infrared, How I hate the night.

- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982)

Where, she wondered, would the darkness go? She knew. It would retreat to the edge of the world, and into the people she knew, and into her; she could feel it lurking there even now, hiding in her mind's shadows with her fears.

- Pamela Sargent, ''The Old Darkness'' (1983)

''You dead awhile there, mon.'' ''It happens,'' he said. ''I'm getting used to it.'' ''You dealin' wi' th' darkness, mon.'' ''Only game in town, it looks like.''

- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

There is no greater dark than the dark between the stars.

- Frederik Pohl, Heechee Rendezvous (1984)

You who sought our land for so long, welcome to the realm of the cold and the dark.

- Joan Slonczewski, TheWall around Eden (1989)

It's important to have a way of seeing through a dark time. To keep waiting, for the light to come.

- Joan Slonczewski, TheWall around Eden (1989)

''The darkness is where danger comes from,'' Peter said, ''and from the fire comes only illusion.''

- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)