Darkness Quotes

‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’ – Martin Luther King, Jr.

‘Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.’ – Desmond Tutu

‘People are like stained – glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.’ – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

‘Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.’ – Carl Jung

‘Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.’ – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

‘Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.’ – Helen Keller

‘Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.’ – Edgar Allan Poe

‘I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.’ – Og Mandino

‘In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.’ – Francis Bacon

‘To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.’ – Robert Schumann

‘Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.’ – Desiderius Erasmus

‘There is no darkness but ignorance.’ – William Shakespeare

‘Darkness comes. In the middle of it, the future looks blank. The temptation to quit is huge. Don’t. You are in good company… You will argue with yourself that there is no way forward. But with God, nothing is impossible. He has more ropes and ladders and tunnels out of pits than you can conceive. Wait. Pray without ceasing. Hope.’ – John Piper

‘Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.’ – Werner Herzog

‘For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.’ – Reba McEntire

‘We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us thru that darkness to a safe and sane future.’ – John F. Kennedy

‘The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.’ – Nikos Kazantzakis

‘So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.’ – T. S. Eliot

‘A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.’ – C. S. Lewis

‘Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.’ – May Sarton

‘The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.’ – Leonardo da Vinci

‘Education is the movement from darkness to light.’ – Allan Bloom

‘Clouds and darkness surround us, yet Heaven is just, and the day of triumph will surely come, when justice and truth will be vindicated.’ – Mary Todd Lincoln

‘In complete darkness we are all the same, it is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us, don’t let your eyes deceive you.’ – Janet Jackson

‘When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.’ – Alexis de Tocqueville

‘There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.’ – Carl Sagan

‘I guess darkness serves a purpose: to show us that there is redemption through chaos. I believe in that. I think that’s the basis of Greek mythology.’ – Brendan Fraser

‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.’ – S. E. Hinton

‘There is a good principle which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman.’ – Pythagoras

‘Relish everything that’s inside of you, the imperfections, the darkness, the richness and light and everything. And that makes for a full life.’ – Anthony Hopkins

‘He who busies himself with things other than improvement of his own self becomes perplexed in darkness and entangled in ruin. His evil spirits immerse him deep in vices and make his bad actions seem handsome.’ – Ali ibn Abi Talib

‘Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.’ – Terry Pratchett

‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.’ – Marianne Williamson

‘Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.’ – Meister Eckhart

‘I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.’ – Ingmar Bergman

‘Rain symbolizes darkness but also represents an essential part of rebirth.’ – Sabrina Claudio

‘Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.’ – Mother Teresa

‘There’s too much darkness in the world. Everywhere you turn, someone is tryin’ to tear someone down in some way; everywhere you go, there’s a feeling of inadequacy, or a feeling that you’re not good enough. I want to bring a certain light to the world.’ – Alicia Keys

‘Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other.’ – Laurence Sterne

‘My broken brilliance will shine a light in the darkness.’ – Matt Hardy

‘Imperfection and perfection go so hand in hand, and our dark and our light are so intertwined, that by trying to push the darkness or the so-called negative aspects of our life to the side… we are preventing ourselves from the fullness of life.’ – Jeff Bridges

‘The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.’ – Henry David Thoreau

‘Sometimes when you’re overwhelmed by a situation – when you’re in the darkest of darkness – that’s when your priorities are reordered.’ – Phoebe Snow

‘I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us. There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God. The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say.’ – Geronimo

‘A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.’ – Percy Bysshe Shelley

‘A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition’s night, an inspiration and a prophecy.’ – Robert Green Ingersoll

‘Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding – yet beautiful – Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.’ – Buzz Aldrin

‘From my point of view, God is the light that illuminates the darkness, even if it does not dissolve it, and a spark of divine light is within each of us.’ – Pope Francis

‘And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro’ nature, moulding men.’ – Alfred Lord Tennyson

‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ – Vladimir Nabokov

‘Through every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.’ – Edwin Hubbel Chapin

‘When you look on the bright side, you’re acknowledging that there is a dark side at which you are choosing not to gaze. If you think that the darkest hour is before the dawn, you accept that you are moving from darkness to light.’ – Srikumar Rao

‘I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.’ – Richard Wright

‘I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.’ – George Fox

‘The darkness of death is like the evening twilight; it makes all objects appear more lovely to the dying.’ – Jean Paul

‘No durable things are built on violent passion. Nature grows her plants in silence and in darkness, and only when they have become strong do they put their heads above the ground.’ – Annie Besant

‘The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.’ – Pliny the Elder

‘There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don’t understand. Internal is the human heart.’ – John Carpenter

‘Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.’ – Caspar David Friedrich

‘As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of darkness.’ – William O. Douglas

‘All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.’ – John Ruskin

‘Great and glorious God, and Thou Lord Jesus, I pray you shed abroad your light in the darkness of my mind. Be found of me, Lord, so that in all things I may act only in accordance with Thy holy will.’ – Francis of Assisi

‘You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.’ – Edward Abbey

‘Even Helen Keller, who was born blind and deaf, could see God. No doubt, in her silent darkness, every fragrant flower, every ray of the warm sun, every taste that touched her tongue told her that there was a God who created all things. Jodie Foster shouldn’t therefore be surprised that people are surprised that she’s an atheist.’ – Ray Comfort

‘In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.’ – Abbas Kiarostami

‘We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.’ – Thomas Merton

‘Every candle that gets lit in the dark room must feel a little rejection from the darkness around it, but the last thing I want from those who hold a different world view to me is to accept me.’ – Kirk Cameron

‘Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.’ – Yousuf Karsh

‘The rising sun can dispel the darkness of night, but it cannot banish the blackness of malice, hatred, bigotry, and selfishness from the hearts of humanity.’ – David O. McKay

‘You’ve got to be one that, wherever you are, like a flower, you’ve got to blossom where you’re planted. You cannot eliminate darkness. You cannot banish it by cursing darkness. The only way to get rid of darkness is light and to be the light yourself.’ – Cory Booker

‘When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.’ – Carl Friedrich Gauss

‘My characters are always unlucky in love. It’s annoying, but perhaps there is something in me that is suited to characters that have a darkness. Maybe it’s why I play such damaged people when I’m not particularly damaged myself, I would say.’ – Vanessa Kirby

‘To say I support religious freedom is to say I support idolatry. It’s to say I support lies. I support Hell. I support the kingdom of darkness. You can’t say that.’ – John MacArthur

‘Even in our moment of greatest darkness, there is light. And there is hope. And there is hope not only for our own lives, but we should be hopeful about our ability to change the world.’ – Ritchie Torres

‘One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.’ – Morris West

‘To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.’ – Coventry Patmore

‘I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy – I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection.’ – Irvin D. Yalom

‘The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.’ – Lady Gaga

‘Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.’ – Louis Aragon

‘Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness.’ – Julia Cameron

‘To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.’ – Frank Herbert

‘As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.’ – Carl Jung

‘To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.’ – Thomas Jefferson

‘I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.’ – Anna Quindlen

‘When there’s doom and gloom, don’t forget there’s darkness before dawn.’ – Rakesh Jhunjhunwala

‘A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.’ – Jean Genet

‘When the darkness comes, keep an eye on the light – whatever that is for you – no matter how far away it seems.’ – Jan Berry

‘History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.’ – Terence McKenna

‘We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.’ – Jiddu Krishnamurti

‘Words are really beautiful, but they’re limited. Words are very male, very structured. But the voice is the netherworld, the darkness, where there’s nothing to hang onto. The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is.’ – Jeff Buckley

‘To be a comedian, you have to have some darkness behind it. I certainly draw on my past, and it helps.’ – Matthew Perry

‘I’m intrigued by the dark. Out of darkness comes creation.’ – Famke Janssen

‘To prejudge other men’s notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eyes.’ – John Locke

‘In Buddhist culture, offering food to the monk symbolizes the action of goodness, and if you have no opportunity to support the practice of spirituality, then you are somehow left in the realm of darkness.’ – Thich Nhat Hanh

‘Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.’ – Aldous Huxley

‘You have to expect spiritual warfare whenever you stand up for righteousness or call attention to basic values. It’s just a matter of light battling the darkness. But the light wins every time. You can’t throw enough darkness on light to put it out.’ – Thomas Kinkade

‘You want to put out good vibes for the viewers, even if so many stories that have to be told and that need to be told have a lot of darkness in them, because the world has a lot of darkness in it.’ – Maya Hawke

‘God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.’ – Abraham Joshua Heschel

‘The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.’ – Victor Hugo

‘Blessed be God, that we live in these latter times – the latter times of the reign of darkness and imposture. Great is our privilege, precious our opportunity, to cooperate with the Saviour in the blessed work of enlarging and establishing his kingdom throughout the world.’ – Adoniram Judson

‘Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.’ – Helen Keller

‘Honestly, I think there’s a cycle to the popularity of fantasy and fairytales that usually coincides with times of unrest or hardship in our own world. By retelling these legends or immersing ourselves in fantasy realms, we can safely explore the very real, very day-to-day darkness of our own lives.’ – Sarah J. Maas

‘Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar Stood ruled, stood vast infinitude confined; Till at his second bidding darkness fled, Light shone, and order from disorder sprung.’ – John Milton

‘Man dies of cold, not of darkness.’ – Miguel de Unamuno

‘If I play a villain, I try to find his lightness and his good side. And if I play a hero or a good guy, I’ll try to find his darkness or his flaws. Because I don’t believe in good and evil. I believe in grays.’ – Joel Kinnaman

‘The patriot who feels himself in the service of God, who acknowledges Him in all his ways, has the promise of Almighty direction, and will find His Word in his greatest darkness.’ – Francis Scott Key

‘Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.’ – Leonardo da Vinci

‘Part of the power of all storytelling is reassurance, offering hope to those sat in the darkness, that good can succeed and wrongdoing fail.’ – Charles Sturridge

‘The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.’ – Gary Zukav

‘Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone.’ – Hodding Carter

‘Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you’re handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood and smiting the firstborn, give me a pass. And tell me when it’s over.’ – P. J. O’Rourke

‘I’ve never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There’s always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music.’ – Thom Yorke

‘We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.’ – Michio Kaku

‘We have darkness as human beings.’ – Tech N9ne

‘Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.’ – Marshall McLuhan

‘Genius without religion is only a lamp on the outer gate of a palace; it may serve to cast a gleam of light on those that are without, while the inhabitant sits in darkness.’ – Hannah More

‘If no pain, then no love. If no darkness, no light. If no risk, then no reward. It’s all or nothing. In this damn world, it’s all or nothing.’ – Glennon Doyle Melton

”Little Night’ has layers of meaning. There’s something enchanted about night. All those heavenly bodies, shooting stars, the crescent moon, celestial phenomenon. Owls fly at night, and first kisses happen. Night is romantic. Alternately, darkness hides the worst of human behavior.’ – Luanne Rice

‘Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.’ – William Shakespeare

‘Blemishes are hid by night and every fault forgiven; darkness makes any woman fair.’ – Ovid

‘Most of us are imprisoned by something. We’re living in darkness until something flips on the switch.’ – Wynonna Judd

‘Testimony is the beginning of and a prerequisite to continuing conversion. Testimony is a point of departure; it is not an ultimate destination. Strong testimony is the foundation upon which conversion is established. Testimony alone is not and will not be enough to protect us in the latter-day storm of darkness and evil in which we are living.’ – David A. Bednar

‘That taxes may be the ostensible cause is true, but that they are the true cause is as far remote from truth as light from darkness.’ – Henry Knox

‘All the things that I find beautiful have a darkness about them.’ – Paloma Faith

‘I reached this turning point where I was either going to dwell in the darkness or I was just going to slap myself around the face a few times and say, ‘Wake up; you’re incredibly blessed. Focus on all the great things.” – Ant Anstead

‘As you get older, it’s good to open up and acknowledge that everybody has their scary moments, their negative moments. And in order to move on and find comfort and hope, you have to stop running from the darkness and face it. And when you face it, it’s not that scary at all, and sometimes it actually turns around and runs away.’ – Dolores O’Riordan

‘The movies were so healing for me because I had such an isolated, lonely childhood. Going to the movies and having the lights go down, you disappear. If you have esteem issues, suddenly you’re in a void where nobody can see you. You are just by yourself in that darkness, and your loneliness is cured.’ – Michael De Luca

‘You can’t blame things for being dark if the light bulbs aren’t working. So we’re complaining about the darkness when the bulbs aren’t working, and the Bible says that we are the light of the world.’ – Tony Evans

‘Well, darkness with humor… I’m not an extremely suicidal or sad person.’ – Peter Steele

‘To morrow, I believe, is to be an eclipse of the sun, and I think it perfectly meet and proper that the sun in the heavens, and the glory of the Republic should both go into obscurity and darkness together.’ – Benjamin F. Wade

‘The power of the priesthood heals, protects, and inoculates all of the righteous against the powers of darkness.’ – Sheri L. Dew

‘I’m thankful that God gave me light again, and to be light for other people’s darkness is a responsibility that I take very seriously.’ – Tabitha Brown

‘I am 23, the year of the iron birthday, the gate of darkness. I am ill.’ – Allen Ginsberg

‘Lots of people expect ‘Andhadhun’ to be a dark film, given it’s from Sriram Raghavan. But this film is fun, entertaining, thrilling, and while it has moments of darkness, overall it’s not a dark film.’ – Ayushmann Khurrana

‘The 1890s was perhaps the most Gothic decade ever: ‘Dracula,’ ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and ‘The Time Machine,’ not to mention ‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’ were all written between 1890 and 1899.’ – Mark Fisher

‘A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.’ – Anish Kapoor

‘Darkness is important. If you were having fun all the time, you wouldn’t know what dark is.’ – Denzel Curry

‘I’ve always been fascinated with death and darkness, and I still am.’ – The Undertaker

‘Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.’ – Carl Jung

”Frankenstein’ was all about the idea that, through electricity and the destruction of night, man creating light and darkness, we took on god-like powers and then abused them like gods, and we are only men. That’s a story about man making a man in his own image. The inversion of natural order.’ – Benedict Cumberbatch

‘As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness.’ – Mary Gauthier

‘The fight against terrorism is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness.’ – Ariel Sharon

‘I’ve been in the Concorde, I’ve seen the curvature of the Earth, the beginning of the darkness. I want more – I want to go up there.’ – Wally Funk

‘Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time, Be crushed by the spirit of light.’ – Boris Pasternak

”Darkness’ is a subjective word; it depends what your viewpoint is and how you live life.’ – Taylor Momsen

‘Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.’ – Martin Luther King, Jr.

‘Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.’ – Thomas Carlyle

”Monty Python’ became my religion when I was 10. It led me out of the depths of darkness. I loved ‘The Goodies,’ too, and ‘The Two Ronnies.’ I watched those shows on the public television station in Chicago.’ – Bob Odenkirk

‘Squirrel Girl is basically a Silver Age character in the modern age, and that makes her a fish out of water in a lot of ways. She likes being a superhero. She likes fighting crime. She doesn’t sit around brooding in the darkness of her Squirrel Hole trying to figure out new ways to make crime pay.’ – Ryan North

‘Comedian sort of enjoys the darkness because, essentially, he’s a thug. He’s just not a nice guy.’ – Jeffrey Dean Morgan

‘Kevin Sullivan? He’s Anthony Hopkins. The Prince of Darkness. The devil himself. Against the ‘American Dream’ Dusty Rhodes, the chubby plumber’s son from Austin, Texas. My God, those billboards go up, and you’re going to want to go see it.’ – Dusty Rhodes

‘Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.’ – Terry Pratchett

‘We have a choice about how we take what happens to us in our life and whether or not we allow it to turn us. We can become consumed by hate and darkness, or we’re able to regain our humanity somehow, or come to terms with things and learn something about ourselves.’ – Angelina Jolie

‘True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.’ – Henry David Thoreau

‘I wondered vaguely if this was when it would end, whether I would pull up tonight’s darkness like a quilt and be dead and at peace evermore.’ – William Manchester

‘In complete darkness, it is only knowledge and wisdom that separates us.’ – Janet Jackson

‘Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.’ – Marguerite Duras

‘When you become an instrument in God’s hands as He transfers someone from the realm of darkness into the kingdom of His Son, you make a difference in the person’s eternal destiny. Not only that, but Satan also receives a devastating blow.’ – Charles Stanley

‘I have this JPM thing: jokes per minute. I’ve worked out that I should get in about 12 punchlines in five minutes. I need them all. It’s like when you walk down a road, if there’s a lamp post that’s out, it’s fine if you can see the next one’s alight, but if there’s two out, that’s a period of frightening darkness.’ – Frank Skinner

‘I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head – big darkness, soon come – but every once in a while you get a fair chance to have it both ways, and the annual NCAA basketball Tournament is one of them.’ – Hunter S. Thompson

‘And if, happy in the lot of no created thing, he withdraws into the center of his own unity, his spirit, made one with God, in the solitary darkness of God, who is set above all things, shall surpass them all.’ – Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

‘The history of New Orleans was always a fascination to me – such a blend of light and darkness and plague and pleasure and hedonism and fear and death. It’s just a very, very intriguing city. I have this strange love relationship with it.’ – Beth Moore

‘I’ve realised darkness and light are inter-dependent, just as death is an enhancer of life.’ – Tony Harrison

‘The darkness of clubs makes me feel much more secure, and you can hide behind smoke and lights.’ – Oliver Sim

‘When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me. There’s been times in my life when I had to do that. It speaks to me and applies to me.’ – Minkah Fitzpatrick

‘When autumn darkness falls, what we will remember are the small acts of kindness: a cake, a hug, an invitation to talk, and every single rose. These are all expressions of a nation coming together and caring about its people.’ – Jens Stoltenberg

‘You can control and censor a child’s reading, but you can’t control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child’s heart.’ – Hilary Mantel

‘There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.’ – Malcolm Muggeridge

”Nice Guys’ has darkness in it and parts that are kind of odd, but there are also parts where it’s heartfelt and soulful. You can switch back and forth.’ – Shane Black

‘Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, if by this we mean evil is a part of God’s plan. But God does ensure that evil will not prevail and that light will always, ultimately, overcome the darkness. If we follow God’s lead, our work is to push back the darkness.’ – Adam Hamilton

‘I am intrigued by the darkness.’ – Zak Bagans

‘Chris Cornell painted in song the darkness and beauty of life in Seattle.’ – Mike McCready

”Top Of The Lake’ is a great story with a beginning, and a middle and an end, about darkness – it’s like the heart of darkness. And everybody has got one. When I was reading it, I couldn’t put it down, and I wanted to know what was going to happen next.’ – Holly Hunter

‘America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.’ – John Updike

‘If you’re playing a good guy, you show some darkness. If you’re playing a dark guy, you show something different, like humor, that will mix it up and hopefully surpass the audience’s expectations. What I’m battling all the time is complacency in the audience. I try to bring a little mystery to what might happen because that engages people more.’ – Campbell Scott

‘Horror serves a cathartic role in human society, all throughout the world. It is a way of confronting the darkness, both within and without.’ – Nancy A. Collins

‘Unless we form the habit of going to the Bible in bright moments as well as in trouble, we cannot fully respond to its consolations because we lack equilibrium between light and darkness.’ – Helen Keller

‘Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.’ – Leonardo da Vinci

‘Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.’ – Alan Furst

‘I don’t know what God has planned for me or you or anyone, but I do know that in darkness, you discover an indistinguishable light.’ – Cory Booker

‘The more a nation gets into darkness, the more it’s going to hate the light. The more it’s going to run from the light. And we have a generation of people who have given themselves to darkness, and they’ve embraced atheism, because it gets them away from moral responsibility to God.’ – Ray Comfort

‘When I first started out writing the ‘Darkness’ books, there was, at least in my mind, a certain sort of rulebook we had to follow.’ – Frank Peretti

‘On a deeper level, I think many stories – especially thrillers – can be a journey to the heart of darkness.’ – Terry Hayes

‘The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.’ – Elias Canetti

‘One of the most persistent misconceptions about blindness is that it is a curse from God for misdeeds perpetrated in a past life, which cloaks the blind person in spiritual darkness and makes him not just dangerous, but evil.’ – Rosemary Mahoney

‘If we despond, public confidence is destroyed, the people will no longer yield their support to a hopeless contest, and American liberty is no more. Through the darkness which shrouds our prospects, the ark of safety is visible. Despondency becomes not the dignity of our cause, nor the character of those who are its supporters.’ – Samuel Adams

‘In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.’ – W. Somerset Maugham

‘I say there is no darkness but ignorance.’ – William Shakespeare

‘I find that the older I get, the more I see that there really aren’t huge zeniths of happiness or a huge abyss of darkness as much as there used to be.’ – Paula Cole

‘Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.’ – Carl Jung

‘The Christian experiences and lives a paradox. He possesses joy in sorrow, fulfillment in exile, light in darkness, peace in turmoil, consolation in dryness, contentment in pain and hope in desolation.’ – Mother Angelica

‘Four or five years ago I decided to stop cursing the darkness – I had been complaining about movies and their content for years – and instead to do something about it by getting into the film business.’ – Philip Anschutz

‘I have a fascination with Egypt. It’s the greatest civilization. When the rest of the world was still in darkness, there were universities in Egypt and there were monetary systems, the pyramids.’ – Montel Vontavious Porter

‘It’s only until we confront the darkness of our past that we can responsibly move forward.’ – Winston Duke

‘If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That’s the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We’re in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history.’ – Thom Yorke

‘I have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that have far too long been in the darkness.’ – Amanda Gorman

‘I believe God has called His people to be a light in darkness.’ – Sherri Shepherd

‘So many people get involved with carrying grudges and having these moral battles with people, where they cast themselves as the righteous and the other guy is the dirtbag. They waste tons of energy on it, create all kinds of darkness around themselves and the other person. It gets you nothing.’ – Stephen J. Cannell

‘I have a very large shoebox overflowing with lyrics I’ve been writing and collecting since my teen years and into my late 20s, with lyrics from all walks of my life. Darkness, being in love, being heartbroken, finding yourself… and lyrics that I’ve been sitting on for, like, seven years, that I haven’t done anything with.’ – Evan Rachel Wood

‘And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity.’ – Ernst Toller

‘We Orientals find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and darkness which that thing provides.’ – Junichiro Tanizaki

‘Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.’ – James Madison

‘I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don’t think that’s only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings. I think it really exists and is part of the human condition. I think in the course of your life you figure out ways to deal with that.’ – Kevin Bacon

‘I need to be able to work for 20 or 30 hours in one go in complete darkness, alone with just the computer glow.’ – Grimes

‘Every time I stray away from the Lord’s word, I find emptiness and darkness.’ – Tyson Fury

‘I make sure I have a smile every day for everybody because our stories within it have a darkness and we don’t need to bleed it into real life because people have got their own issues going on. So I’d always come in and be the biggest idiot on set.’ – Aaron Pedersen

‘As the sun outshines the brightest star in the heavens, dispels every vestige of darkness and gives life and light to all beings, so, in a not too distant future, will the true religion of Christ supersede and obliterate all other religions, to the eternal benefit of mankind.’ – Max Heindel

‘I actually think sadness and darkness can be very beautiful and healing.’ – Duncan Sheik

‘The Self is self-luminous without darkness and light, and is the reality which is self-manifest. Therefore, one should not think of it as this or as that. The very thought of thinking will end in bondage.’ – Ramana Maharshi

‘We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.’ – Terry Jones

‘The older I get, the more I see that there really aren’t huge zeniths of happiness or a huge abyss of darkness as much as there used to be. I tend to walk a middle ground.’ – Paula Cole

‘People should never worship images. The spread of mental darkness is due to the prevalence of idolatry.’ – Dayananda Saraswati

‘For a scientist, it is a unique experience to live through a period in which his field of endeavour comes to bloom – to be witness to those rare moments when the dawn of understanding finally descends upon what appeared to be confusion only a while ago – to listen to the sound of darkness crumbling.’ – George Emil Palade

‘Evil is relative – and what I mean by that is that our villains are as complex, as deep and as compelling as any of our heroes. Every antagonist in the DC Universe has a unique darkness, desire and drive. And the reason for being of ‘Forever Evil’ is to explore that darkness.’ – Geoff Johns

‘Love and memory last and will so endure till the game is called because of darkness.’ – Gene Fowler

‘Strange – is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.’ – Horace

‘Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.’ – Cyril Connolly

‘Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.’ – John Ruskin

‘In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.’ – Thomas Wolfe

‘I have always felt that laughter in the face of reality is probably the finest sound there is and will last until the day when the game is called on account of darkness. In this world, a good time to laugh is any time you can.’ – Linda Ellerbee

‘But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?’ – James Thurber

‘From the world of darkness I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment.’ – Charles Manson

‘I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.’ – Havelock Ellis

‘My son – and what’s a song? A thing begot within a pair of minutes, thereabout, a lump bred up in darkness.’ – Thomas Kyd

‘This is an area you always need to address when you’re dealing with Dracula is the fact that there is something kind of attractive in his darkness – which there isn’t in other horror characters.’ – Richard Roxburgh

‘I’m obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.’ – Tom Baker

‘There is no greater mystery to me than that of light traveling through darkness.’ – Alexander Volkov

‘You feel quite distant by playing at huge stadiums year after year, where you only can see a great darkness in front of you.’ – Robert Plant

‘An increase in light gives an increase in darkness.’ – Sam Francis

‘Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.’ – John Hurt

‘Although I had arrived in total darkness the light of truth at once burst upon my mind and I perceived most clearly that the republicans had overreached themselves.’ – Francis Bond Head

‘On the last morning of Virginia’s bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.’ – Patricia Cornwell

‘The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.’ – Edwin Booth

‘These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas – and new connections between ideas – lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you into the darkness.’ – Dave Sim

‘I think I would cope like anyone copes with any tragedy. I’m sure I would be very upset for a while and then there would come a point where I would either have to stay in this place of darkness and anger, or I’d have to accept that it happened.’ – Jason Ritter

‘In a World where people are surrounded by darkness, ignorance and fear, it is a sign of hope to be celebrating Islam’s message of peace and light, and the last great Messenger, born and chosen to deliver them to all mankind.’ – Cat Stevens

‘It’s a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what’s beyond in the darkness, beyond where you’re writing.’ – Michael Ondaatje

‘Is it not evident that the Canadas, as well as the other colonies, have been left in a great measure to grope their way as they could through the darkness which surrounds them, almost totally unaided by the parent state?’ – John Strachan

‘The unsaved people will be cast into utter darkness forever.’ – Tim LaHaye

‘I think seeing Pryor’s first movie, Live In Concert, when I was in high school changed my life. Pryor really put the heart in darkness for me.’ – Marc Maron

‘Overseas, America’s fighting men and women have been waging war against those who would attack America and plunge the world into a period of darkness, and their success can easily be seen.’ – Mark Kennedy

‘As long as one person lives in darkness then it seems to be a responsibility to tell other people.’ – Bill Hicks

‘There was a darkness, a melancholy, that people had trouble accepting. Maybe now, it would work better.’ – Alain Resnais

‘He’s meant to be that classic Homer, Ulysses, Hercules – a character who goes out or has some gift of some kind. He goes on a journey of discovery and part of that is falling into darkness – the temptations of life.’ – Robert Redford

‘It is like visiting one’s funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.’ – Harold Brodkey

‘But I notice that there is a lack of darkness in my movies and I don’t know where that comes from.’ – Lasse Hallstrom

‘I try to be a guide for people, to make their darkness bright and to make the pathway light, and never to condemn or control or criticize.’ – Little Richard

‘From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.’ – Mark Haddon

‘The moment you enlist in the army of God, you personally become a target. You need to remember that if you’re living for and walking with Jesus Christ, the powers of darkness are aligned against you.’ – Walter Martin

‘When I do a novel, I don’t really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.’ – Francis Ford Coppola

‘See you in the darkness.’ – Gary Gilmore

‘But he said Blanket Hill should be a national monument. And so we came out of his chambers feeling, though while we had lost to the powers of darkness, we had at least shown one Federal Judge what the right path would have been.’ – William Kunstler

‘I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh.’ – Erich Maria Remarque

‘I think we all have a lot of darkness in our bellies. As an actor, the challenge of tapping into that, reaching down into that sadness or anger, is very therapeutic.’ – Kevin Bacon

‘What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that’s akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror.’ – Anish Kapoor

‘From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.’ – Janet Frame

‘The best I can say is that it’s better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It’s better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.’ – Paul Westerberg

‘I think we both have some darkness in us. But when we are together, we tend to concentrate more on the light.’ – Bobby Farrelly

‘And introduce an element of cynicism and darkness into it and just realize that we’re all vulnerable. We are humans. There is a finite end to this life and we’re all going to face it and a little silliness can help.’ – Alan Thicke

‘But it is true that sometimes an enveloping darkness aids one to clearer vision; as in a panorama building, for example, where the obscurity about the entrance prepares one better for the climax, and gives the scene depicted a more real and vivid appearance.’ – Pierre Loti

‘We made it known that we were trying to show the reality of France. People think of Paris as the city of love or the city of light, but where you got love you got hate, where you got light you got darkness.’ – Mathieu Kassovitz

‘This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind’s best thoughts, and my soul’s triumph over the powers of darkness.’ – Isaac Mayer Wise

‘The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.’ – V. S. Naipaul

‘I like their darkness but I also like the pop-side of the Velvet Underground.’ – Martin Gore

‘Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.’ – Thomas Carlyle

‘If you love large, you’ve got to hurt large. If you’ve got a lot of light, you’ve probably got an equal amount of darkness.’ – Sarah McLachlan

‘Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.’ – George Jean Nathan

‘Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.’ – Stefan Zweig

‘I just don’t think there are any rules to color. You have a small space with no windows? Put lamps in there, make it dramatic, paint the ceiling black. Do something with it. If it’s dark, accentuate the darkness.’ – David Bromstad

‘I definitely gravitate towards quality genre projects and genre of any kind whether it’s science fiction, horror or really anything. I’m just drawn to quality. I don’t think ‘Darkness Falls’ is horror; there isn’t any gore by any stretch of the imagination.’ – Emma Caulfield

‘I’m really an inner spirit that only makes itself known through the music. A lot of people think I’m an introvert, or quiet and moody. I’ve even heard some people say that there’s a certain mystery or darkness about me. I’m not that way. I’m just really into what I do.’ – Faith Evans

‘With whatever talent and resources I have, I’m trying to bring light to penetrate the darkness many people feel.’ – Thomas Kinkade

‘All the characters I play are all inside of me in a way, and they’re all different, the darkness, the lightness, whatever that is.’ – Alexander Skarsgard

‘The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.’ – Michael Connelly

‘We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn’t. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany?’ – Erik Larson

‘At the dawn of his administration, President Obama opined: ‘A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.’ Magical rays of white-hot sunlight emanated from his media-manufactured halo. And then bureaucratically engineered darkness settled over the land.’ – Michelle Malkin

‘I grew up with a lot of fairy tales. And they had an essence of darkness to them.’ – Rupert Sanders

‘I don’t think we can sit on the fence anymore. We have to make up our minds. And if one wants to choose the path of darkness, then so be it, but be conscious of what it is you’re doing.’ – Seal

‘The America we all know has been a story of the many becoming one, uniting to preserve liberty, uniting to build the greatest economy in the world, uniting to save the world from unspeakable darkness.’ – Mitt Romney

‘We went into darkness after being in daylight the whole time on the way to the Moon. And then we went into darkness. And we’re in the shadow… of the Moon.’ – Gene Cernan

‘I don’t think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone’s got a little of everything.’ – John Hawkes

‘Minority is about being an individual. It’s like you have to sift through the darkness to find your place and be that individual you want to be your entire life.’ – Billie Joe Armstrong

‘Dramatically, I like darkness, I like conflict – but I don’t see the world as defined by them.’ – Andrea Arnold

‘We hope that the long darkness through which the Burmese people have lived may now be coming to an end.’ – William Hague

‘The best pop music is the songs that a group of people can dance to, but you can also listen to in your bed and cry. That’s something obviously that The Beatles started and… so having that darkness there opens another door.’ – Andrew Dost

‘The best pop music is the songs that a group of people can dance to, but you can also listen to in your bed and cry. That’s something obviously that The Beatles started and… so having that darkness there opens another door.’ – Jack Antonoff

‘If you have an issue with homosexuality, then it comes to your own fear and your own darkness.’ – Tori Amos

‘If I’m going to be a leader then I have to go places that other people are afraid to go to. That’s what makes a leader. To be not afraid to step out and go over the frontline. To stare darkness right in the face.’ – R. Kelly

‘I don’t believe there’s any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.’ – Ian Mcewan

‘Generally in my films like ‘Hearts of Darkness’ or ‘Picture This,’ I try not to make myself a presence in the film.’ – George Hickenlooper

‘Storms and darkness scared me, but somehow it encouraged me to learn about nature and I think nothing’s dark, dark is beautiful too.’ – Bai Ling

‘I think that there’s a hidden darkness in all of us!’ – Matthew Fox

‘I do tend to divide my childhood into darkness and light, and the first seven years were certainly the darkness.’ – Robert Carlyle

‘The lighthearted moments of ‘Girls’ are really not speckled throughout and that to me is just super exciting, to be able to delve into the darkness that you are greeted with in your early 20s and the fear and what that makes you do, the places that you can potentially go with that.’ – Zosia Mamet

‘I was a product of a divorced family and I used humor as a weapon to combat sadness. I used comedy to make my mother laugh in light of the darkness that she faced, and to me it became a very powerful tool at a very young age, at six. I saw how therapeutic it could be.’ – Josh Gad

‘I definitely like a little bit of darkness, a little edge. I get a little bored when things are maybe too simple or too… expected.’ – Deborah Ann Woll

‘I did some pretty crazy stuff that I never thought I would do, for the sake of a movie, like surfing in eight-foot waves in pitch-black darkness, where I can’t see anything. That still haunts me, kind of, in my nightmares, but it was worth it, it was fun.’ – Leven Rambin

‘I’m at the age where I just want to experiment. You know, play a crime investigator one week, a pregnant girl one week, an angel of darkness another week. I don’t want to define myself by any category, or age, or role.’ – Leven Rambin

‘When you bring the darkness to the table, it doesn’t rule you or hurt other people, but when we keep it secret, it’s dangerous.’ – Natalie Goldberg

‘I still don’t feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic language. You can’t separate one from the other.’ – Toby Jones

‘I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It’s an honest descent into darkness. And you can’t have the joy without the grief – it’s why we listen to Mozart’s ‘Requiem.” – Andre Dubus III

‘For most of my life I’ve liked to pretend I live in a starship. Punching in fake codes to get into doorways that obviously are not secure. I love that idea of living on a spaceship. Because essentially we are: a gigantic thing floating in some infinite darkness that’s running on principles that we don’t even understand.’ – Reggie Watts

‘It’s something that people relate to – and I hope my kid doesn’t relate to – but there’s a level of believability in playing complex characters. You know, Christopher Walken has done some hilarious comedies, De Niro. There’s great room for complexity and darkness to do well in comedies.’ – Jeremy Sisto

‘We’ve all got darkness inside us. And I’ve got quite a lot of darkness.’ – Antony Sher

‘Mining created Chile. The story of men who go down into the mountain and chip away at minerals in the darkness and then suffer an accident that leaves them at the mercy of that darkness is part of the DNA of Chile, an integral part of the country’s history.’ – Ariel Dorfman

‘There’s a darkness under ‘The Hangover’ because ultimately there’s a missing person and it’s not really that funny. There’s a sort of darkness under it that I love, and still people are laughing as hard if not harder than they did in ‘Old School.” – Todd Phillips

‘I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.” – Colum McCann

’37 is a lumpy number, a bit like porridge. Six is very small and dark and cold, and whenever I was little trying to understand what sadness is I would imagine myself inside a number six and having that experience of cold and darkness. Similarly, number four is a shy number.’ – Daniel Tammet

‘The original ‘Edge of Darkness’ was fantastic, a fabulous series. It was of its time, but this film version shows that times really haven’t changed.’ – Ray Winstone

‘For feel-good fiction to work, there has to be an element of darkness.’ – Marian Keyes

‘I feel like there’s so much darkness in all of my books.’ – Rachel Cohn

‘It is critical that writers who embrace the light of Christ’s redemptive love characterize the darkness arrayed against us in a way that is consistent with its true nature.’ – Ted Dekker

‘My stories are not Christianized at all. I don’t even have any Christians in my stories. What they are, are stories about ordinary people going through extraordinary circumstances in which I’m exploring truth. How light overcomes darkness in a way that’s unmistakable to anyone who has any kind of faith.’ – Ted Dekker

‘My journey is so similar to everyone else’s journey, because we all are human. We all have been defeated by the powers of darkness, and we all find redemption in the light of Christ.’ – Ted Dekker

‘It’s critical that we use a very dark brush to paint evil. When you bring the light into that darkness as characterized in John 1, that light is very vivid. When it dispels the darkness, we see the brilliance that’s there.’ – Ted Dekker

‘God seeks to influence humanity. This is at the heart of the Christmas story. It is the story of light coming into the darkness, of a Savior to show us the way, of light overcoming the darkness, of God’s work to save the world.’ – Adam Hamilton

‘In anything there has to be dark and light. There’s a lot of joy in my paintings and a lot of darkness.’ – Gloria Vanderbilt

‘Let us not curse the darkness. Let us kindle little lights.’ – Dada Vaswani

‘When you start hiding things away, that’s when the darkness creeps up. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.’ – Steve Kazee

‘The Jews did not go into darkness all at once. It was a gradual work, until they could not discern the gift of God in sending his Son.’ – Ellen G. White

‘I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!’ – Taiye Selasi

‘I don’t share lots of the phobias that horror movies tap into. I don’t mind spiders or snakes or darkness.’ – Helen Mirren

‘I’m an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard’s books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work – the pursuit of darkness, the negative – and I think in some sense I’ve internalised that as what one is supposed to do.’ – Ben Marcus

‘Kabbalah is all about change. It isn’t about being proud of our good qualities: the wisdom is about transforming our darkness into light.’ – Yehuda Berg

‘Darkness is the only path to light. It is not our wonderful gifts that make us closer to God: it’s using our garbage to transform ourselves. This is the key that unlocks the door that opens to God.’ – Yehuda Berg

‘I have moments of darkness, of anger, and moments of rage. They do creep up at the most inopportune times. Not to recognize that in my music would give people a sense of sainthood that I don’t necessarily have or even want to have.’ – K’naan

‘It is impious to say that evil has its origin from God, because naught contrary is produced by the contrary. Life does not generate death, nor is darkness the beginning of light, nor is disease the maker of health, but in the changes of conditions there are transitions from one condition to the contrary.’ – Saint Basil

‘Celebrate your family’s bleakest moments and how your relatives overcame them. In doing so, you will encounter darkness, but you’ll give your children the confidence that they, too, shall overcome.’ – Bruce Feiler

‘When you grow up in one town and your life revolves around it, you are very aware of any darkness on the edge of town. That’s because it’s scary and it’s inviting.’ – Melissa Etheridge

‘This world is very dark, but in Heaven there is no darkness.’ – Thomas Kinkade

‘I’ve always been a person afraid of the dark. I was taught that when you have complete darkness, that’s when spirits walk. In our house when I was growing up, all the doors were always cracked a little bit at night so you could get light into the room.’ – Tony Dorsett

‘As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘Problems will disappear as darkness disappears with the onset of light.’ – Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

‘The story of ‘Mirror Mirror’ is in many ways a story about evolution. It’s about the evolution of a child into an adult. It’s about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. It’s about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.’ – Gregory Maguire

‘One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.’ – Graham Hawkes

‘You know, I’ve read Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ about fifteen times.’ – James Balog

‘For the first five years of Luca’s life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there’s a danger of suffocating your kids, too.’ – Janine di Giovanni

‘I always loved movies, especially watching some of my mom’s films when I was younger, like ‘Out of Darkness,’ where she played a schizophrenic.’ – Evan Ross

‘If you’re in a workplace you don’t like right now, be encouraged because God will use it for your good. Think about it this way: He wants you to be a light in the darkness – and He’s putting His confidence in you!’ – Joyce Meyer

‘There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That’s where the real art lies. See, I always suspect characters who are painted as lovely, decent human beings. I would always question where the darkness lies.’ – Martin McDonagh

‘The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.’ – Margaret Atwood

‘I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness… I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.’ – Charles Krauthammer

‘There’s a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody’s family. We all pretend to outsiders that it’s not so, but behind locked doors, there are usually high emotions running.’ – Salman Rushdie

‘I was adopted into this incredible home, a loving, positive environment, yet I had this yearning, this kind of darkness that was also inside me.’ – Faith Hill

‘I’ll speak for myself, but there’s a lot of humor to be found in sarcasm and darkness. You talk to any paramedic, they survive by developing a pretty off-kilter sense of humor.’ – Nicolas Cage

‘Like civil-rights protesters who sang rousing hymns as they were carried off to jail, Twitterers are bearing witness to what’s happening around them, and calling out into the darkness of cyberspace for confirmation. I’m here. You’re here, too. We are present.’ – Douglas Rushkoff

‘The most dangerous part of the race is early evening and especially early morning. It’s the twilight zone. Either you’re going into darkness and the sun is dropping down, or you’re coming out of the darkness and the sun is coming up. At the same time, you’ve got new drivers coming in and feeling their way around the circuit.’ – Allan McNish

‘Humour and high seriousness… Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.’ – Mark Haddon

‘Usually people are ashamed when they do something wrong. People love to live in the darkness… I live in the light. I didn’t do anything wrong by saving human life.’ – Mosab Hassan Yousef

‘You make choices every day and almost every hour that keep you walking in the light or moving away toward darkness.’ – Henry B. Eyring

‘When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn’t have to follow ‘Watchmen’ and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I’m not a particularly dark individual.’ – Alan Moore

‘The point about hope is that it is something that occurs in very dark moments. It is like a flame in the darkness; it isn’t like a confidence and a promise.’ – John Berger

‘There’s something about the darkness that I find unavoidably intoxicating. The knowledge that other people are sleeping and, therefore, unavailable to ruin my solitude, makes me more peaceful than I am during the day.’ – Rachel Nichols

”Darkness on the Edge of Town’ came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs.’ – Bruce Springsteen

‘I think my life in general, like that of any human being, has highs and lows, has moments of great light and moments of great darkness.’ – Thalia

‘The point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.’ – Vladimir Putin

‘I wish I could write ‘Taxi Driver,’ or ‘Blue Velvet,’ something brave, audacious, dramatic and dark. I don’t know if I have the darkness in my own soul to be able to tap into it, unfortunately.’ – Stephen Merchant

‘You hear some people saying, ‘I’m alive on stage; it’s where I feel most complete…’ I don’t understand that at all; I find that weird and depressing. I don’t dislike the audience; it’s just when I’m up there, they’re in the darkness. There’s just a sound of laughing or not. They’re not ‘people,’ they’re this big organism.’ – Stephen Merchant

‘I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society. Perhaps, my belief is along the old saying that ‘it is always better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” – Al Seckel

‘I went through real darkness, but the ring was my light. That was the one place I felt safe. I could control what happened in the ring. My heart turned icy.’ – Sugar Ray Leonard

‘Everybody has a lot of darkness in them because without that you’re not a whole person.’ – Tom Noonan

‘The general manager is kind of like the step into darkness when you reach the top of the league. As GM, you’re responsible for everything, including the maitre d’s and the sommeliers – all these people who have their own agendas. But you probably make less than the maitre d’ and have a lot more work and a lot more headaches.’ – Joe Bastianich

‘Of the big horror movies of the ’70s, you have ‘The Omen,’ ‘The Sentinel,’ ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘The Stepford Wives,’ ‘Burnt Offerings’ – these are all romantic fatalist movies where there’s a sort of glimmer of hope… but darkness wins.’ – Chuck Palahniuk

‘It’s good to explore your darkness.’ – Greg Wise

‘I have come to regard November as the older, harder man’s October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer’s death as winter tightens its grip.’ – Henry Rollins

‘I loved ‘Dumbo.’ I watched Bugs Bunny time and again. The Muppets were big, too. All of those, they have this real, not darkness but poignancy, that’s what makes it stick with you.’ – Pete Docter

‘As a child, I was a brat, and my parents didn’t know how to control me. So they told me ghost stories, which stayed with me. I am still petrified of darkness and being alone.’ – Bipasha Basu

‘I know how I want to try and live my life. I know I don’t want to leave any darkness behind me.’ – Ali Hewson

”I, Malvolio’ is a very, very funny show, a clown show, but there is Beckettian darkness in the character. Some real darkness, some right close to the edge of despair moments.’ – Tim Crouch

‘When an athlete has relegated the persistent rumors of cheating to the back room of the mind, he hasn’t really forgotten them. And when he glances back to where rumors hunker in the darkness, he hopes with a savage heart that somehow, some day, those cheaters will be brought to justice.’ – Don Kardong

‘Being outside during the space walk, the view of the Earth is just spectacular, and getting a chance to do that is just unbelievable, everything about it. You are going around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, so you have 45 minutes of sunlight followed by 45 minutes of darkness. You do a lap every 90 minutes.’ – Michael J. Massimino

‘Gratitude’s not a natural posture. The prince of darkness is ultimately a spoiled ingrate, and I’ve spent most of my life as kin to the fist-shaker.’ – Ann Voskamp

‘To the darkness and the night, the spirits seem to have a natural claim – it is their realm; the boldest of us have sometimes felt an unaccountable creeping in the thick darkness.’ – Richard Jefferies

‘There’s a certain darkness to Slipknot, but at the same time, there’s a very strong dose of positivity. Stone Sour is the same way. There’s a certain melancholy that comes with the slower stuff, but at the end of the day there’s also that other side that is very positive. It’s all how you deliver.’ – Corey Taylor

‘Slipknot is the darkness; Stone Sour is the light. Slipknot is chaos; Stone Sour is structure.’ – Corey Taylor

‘I’m inspired by throwing out any darkness that is inside of me. For me, art cures.’ – Jordi Molla

‘I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.’ – Chris Abani

‘I listen to a lot of really old western and country music. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there… all the heartbreak of the country darkness.’ – Theophilus London

‘We have to rethink the way we light our cities. We have to think again about light as a default solution. Why are all these motorways permanently lit? Is it really needed? Can we maybe be much more selective and create better environments that also benefit from darkness? Can we be more gentle with light?’ – Rogier van der Heide

‘By appreciating the darkness when you design the light, you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives.’ – Rogier van der Heide

‘My kids’ books all have a darkness to them.’ – David Small

‘I’ve always been interested in a certain kind of sophistication in children’s literature. I loved Roald Dahl; I loved the underlying nastiness of some of his – darkness of his tales.’ – David Small

‘I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.’ – John Cusack

‘Dear sisters and brothers, we realize the importance of light when we see darkness.’ – Malala Yousafzai

‘We’re confronted with great darkness as a species right now as spiritual creatures on this planet. I don’t think it’s hopeless, and I don’t want ‘You’ve Never Seen Everything’ to make people feel hopeless. But I think we’ve got to call a spade a spade.’ – Bruce Cockburn

”Southcliffe’ is an anthem to ordinary people’s ability to reinvent themselves in the face of ultimate darkness.’ – Joe Dempsie

‘Darkness is full of possibility.’ – Michael Leunig

‘I’m a great aficionado of history. I was deeply affected by seeing the disintegration of any chance of democracy coping with fascism in the Weimar republic, where woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy, to exploit democracy, to overturn democracy.’ – David Blunkett

‘No one wants to spend too long inside their own darkness.’ – Nick Nolte

‘At times, I feel overwhelmed and my depression leads me into darkness.’ – Dorothy Hamill

‘Vampires were always able to transform into creatures of the night. The dark creatures like bats have always been associated with vampires and using the darkness to their own advantage.’ – Luke Evans

‘It’s a very proactive thing to be dealing with your darkness and getting it out of your system. So it doesn’t have to be in your system.’ – Lykke Li

‘If you go back to, say, the Brothers Grimm or Roald Dahl, you see so much darkness in children’s material.’ – Evangeline Lilly

‘I like playing characters who are fractured, broken. I find that more relatable, for some reason. I don’t feel that I’m like that myself by nature, but there’s just something that you can really grab hold of if people have a darkness in them, I think.’ – Jamie Dornan

‘I’ve always been attracted to darkness.’ – Martin Freeman

‘Perhaps our imagination needs crime stories to fulfill some craving we have, as a way to assuage a darkness in ourselves.’ – James Nesbitt

‘Acting was merely a pastime; I wanted to make films. But theatre, ah – now that was a labour of love. Can there be anything better than performing without retakes and cuts, in front of people you can see, hearing them breathe in the darkness of the hall?’ – Kabir Bedi

‘As an actor, I’m constantly striving to find the darkness in the lighter characters and the lightness in the darker characters.’ – Joel Edgerton

‘I went to see ‘Star Trek Into Darkness,’ and J.J. Abrams, who’s a friend of mine, made this film, and I went to see it at the premiere. Believe it or not, I was really blown away by the comic timing of it.’ – James Gray

‘I’ve played a lot of characters who are creeps or weirdos, with a deep darkness underneath the surface.’ – Zach Woods

‘Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity’s long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology.’ – Paul Di Filippo

‘In everything I write, I’m always striving to hit the right mix of light and darkness, humor and pain, fun and seriousness.’ – Greg van Eekhout

‘There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.’ – Siri Hustvedt

‘War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.’ – Richard Flanagan

‘I think some of my darkness comes from my dad. There is definitely convict history on that side of the family, a lot of dodginess. But with the darkness can also come entrepreneurialism, genius traits.’ – Rebel Wilson

‘I’ve always had a little bit of darkness, and I’ve always been someone who was grieving. I had kind of had a tumultuous upbringing living in an abusive home, so for me, writing has always been a point of catharsis.’ – Mary Lambert

‘Even when I’m in a really great, steady and stable place… I’m clinically bipolar, so that always exists – a darkness always exists.’ – Mary Lambert

‘I need quiet and solitude to work. Darkness is best. If I am wide awake, I can’t write.’ – Jeff Lindsay

‘Later, in the afternoon, I read what I did that morning. It’s almost always a surprise. But I can read it rationally; edit, polish, re-write, and think what I might do tomorrow in the early darkness.’ – Jeff Lindsay

‘The fear that you come to a show called ‘American Horror Story’ with is yours. That being said, I’m glad people are afraid, and I hope that I’m contributing to their fear. I’m really not afraid of my own darkness anymore. I’m not afraid of what I’m capable of.’ – John Carroll Lynch

‘You must stand for something! It does not have to be grand, but it must be a positive that brings light to someone else’s darkness.’ – Anthony Carmona

‘I remember a nightfall from childhood, far from home and off the known track: I’d been walking with some older boys, but they ran off and left me, and as darkness hurried in, I suddenly realised how far from home I was.’ – John Burnside

‘The most irresistible charm of youth is its bubbling enthusiasm. Youth sees no darkness ahead – no defile that has no outlet – it forgets that there is such a thing as failure in the world and believes that mankind has been waiting all these centuries for him to come and be the liberator of truth and energy and beauty.’ – Orison Swett Marden

‘When you go home, fill the house with joy so that the light of it will stream out the windows and doors and illuminate even the darkness. It is just as easy that way as any in the world.’ – Robert Green Ingersoll

‘Right away I think of two books – ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Rebecca’ – and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there’s also an appealing darkness in both of them.’ – Alice McDermott

‘Human experience resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘It’s called ‘Miles Davis, Prince of Darkness,’ and it’s about Miles Davis, the genius, and why he was the way he was, and how he changed music so many times. He changed music six times. So, I’m excited about that movie.’ – George Tillman, Jr.

‘Sanitising stories, leaching out all of the sense of danger and the darkness out of the stories, actually reduces them and stops them from doing what they’re supposed to do, which is teach us how to manage our lives.’ – Kate Forsyth

‘Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that’s my territory, too.’ – Damon Galgut

‘The war broke out, and for a number of years I lived in darkness, with the memory of the lakes, the trees and the skies of Sweden, until I returned in 1946 to spend two unforgettable years in the laboratory of Hugo Theorell.’ – Christian de Duve

‘If you look at satellite photographs of the Far East by night, you’ll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.’ – Barbara Demick

‘Because we were orbiting the earth faster than earth spins on its axis, we went around the earth 16 times a day, an earth day, which meant 16 periods of lightness and 16 periods of darkness in 24 hours. Every so often you’d look towards the earth, and often you could see lightness and darkness together, and dawn and sunset were spectacular.’ – Helen Sharman

‘The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.’ – Tom Brokaw

‘The times I’ve tried not to be funny, it’s never worked, and the times I’m trying not to be dark and just be funny, that never works, either. As varied as my subject matter is, I think the worldview is pretty consistent: seeing darkness and seeing humor.’ – Rebecca Makkai

‘I don’t flinch from darkness, but I’ve always been bothered by what I call gore-nography.’ – Benjamin Percy

‘It is hard to imagine the World Series being held in the sweet hazy sunshine of late September rather than the sour night air of late October, but that is precisely what has transpired in baseball over the past 50 years, a deterioration from light to darkness.’ – George Vecsey

‘In classic noir fiction and film, it is always hot. Fans whirr in sweltering hotel rooms, sweat forms on a stranger’s brow, the muggy air stifles – one can hardly breathe. Come nightfall, there is no relief, only the darkness that allows illicit lovers to meet, the trusted to betray, and murderers to act.’ – Michael Dirda

‘For thousands of years, we’ve insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.’ – Steve Erickson

‘Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.’ – Steve Erickson

‘For me, when I ‘discover’ a story, there is a feeling of buoyancy and clarity, perhaps similar to early morning out on a prairie highway, when darkness lifts and reveals the outline of farmhouses and copses of trees in the distance.’ – David Bergen

‘Most of us, myself included, have forgotten what real darkness is like. We live in a world where light is inescapable. It comes from street lamps, headlights, security floodlights, and even the faint glow of our alarm clocks.’ – Jake Halpern

‘We take it for granted that we can see at all times of day and night. But there was a time, not all that long ago, in the age before electricity, when night brought total darkness – and with it, a not-so-small amount of terror. We get a sense of this when we go camping or when there’s a power outage, and our fear of the darkness is primal.’ – Jake Halpern

‘Every time that I’m in the dark, I imagine what might be lurking in the shadows. It’s kind of like a drug in that way – darkness seems to change the way I think – making me way more prone to fear.’ – Jake Halpern

‘I’m a comedian, and I have my share of anxiety and depression; so do most of my friends. My humor tends to lie in the juxtaposition of extreme lightness – I’m a huge musical-theater fan – and extreme darkness. And so I really like playing with those because that’s how I feel.’ – Rachel Bloom

‘Darkness might seem to obscure what’s happening, but I find it’s always pretty revelatory: it brings out the awe in us, the fear in us, the excitement of exploring the hidden or unknown. It seems to conceal, but it really shines a light on what we want, what we need, and what we’ll do to get it. Especially when we think no one can see us.’ – Kathe Koja

‘I love a good comedy, but the slapstick sitcom belly-laugh sort of comedy – the multicam thing – is not really where my interests lie. I’m very interested in single-cam, in intimate portraits. I like it when comedies have a little bit of realism and a little bit of darkness to them. It makes them more palatable and more relatable and grounded.’ – Tara Lynne Barr

‘In two and a half years’ trekking across central Asia, I’d become attuned to the late autumn conditions when the hazards of winter can blow in under the cover of darkness.’ – Tim Cope

‘To transport picturegoers to a unique place in the glare of the earth, in the darkness of the heart – this, you realize with a gasp of joy, is what movies can do.’ – Richard Corliss

‘It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.’ – H. P. Lovecraft

‘I have that glass-half-empty syndrome, and it takes a great deal of effort to climb out of the hole of darkness that I choose to live in mentally.’ – Christian Slater

‘Do you know who I would love to play? Morticia Addams – then I could use all that darkness to be funny.’ – Monica Bellucci

”Darkest Before Dawn,’ the short film, is basically the film of a man who faces the darkness when his back is against the wall and just about how miracles come in all forms, and even in your darkest times, it comes.’ – Pusha T

‘My children have stolen my dreams in a very literal sense. I’ve lost months in the minutes and hours that Sabine and Zoey have needed me at night, their thin, butterfly-beating hearts pushed against me in the darkness.’ – Alexi Zentner

‘I love playing characters who are multilayered and multidimensional and have a darkness to them, which makes them more realistic and more fun to play.’ – Katee Sackhoff

‘There’s a darkness to Riddick that I think allows people to want him to do bad things because you know Riddick is going to do bad things: that’s just the way it is. But I think that at his core, who he is and what he’s fighting for is something that everybody can identify with.’ – Katee Sackhoff

‘I think there’s something about a character facing the huge problems and challenges of the contemporary world and meeting them with – head on with courage, allowing for darkness and mistake, but ultimately always moral. That’s incredibly, incredibly inspiring, and that’s honestly what I think.’ – Paul Greengrass

‘It’s very nice to do a little bit of the darkness after a little bit of the lightness. Variety is the spice of life. I enjoy both, and hopefully, I will be able to do as big a variety as I possibly can.’ – Thomas Gibson

‘I can’t imagine making something that is made only to be scary. For me, the darkness and scary material has to have meaning attached to it, or I can’t invest the time and energy it takes to write and script or make a movie. It has to mean something.’ – Scott Derrickson

‘If you look at the Qur’an with the eyes of a sound heart, you will see that its six aspects are so brilliant and transparent that no darkness, no misguidance, no doubt or suspicion, no trickery could enter it or find a fissure through which to enter and violate its purity.’ – Said Nursi

‘I feel like the job of an artist is to confront their own darkness and their own demons and fears. And I want to make movies that feel human up on the screen. I don’t really relate to dudes wearing spandex and capes.’ – Derek Cianfrance

‘I don’t think we ever know 100 percent of a person, even ourselves, but I think in families, you get closer to people’s secrets and people’s darkness – and their light, the full contrast of a person.’ – Derek Cianfrance

‘Not every film I do is going to be like ‘Selma,’ but every film I do can be edifying, can be something that points toward I believe to be true. I’m not one to shy away from darkness in movies as long as there is light.’ – David Oyelowo

‘Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.’ – Steve Bannon

‘When my son was 8 months old, he had a febrile seizure. You know, if you’re in the first year – my wife and I refer to it as the ‘darkness.’ You’re just underwater.’ – Jeff Nichols

‘I have joy. Canadians have the reputation of making dark movies because we are in this society where we have the space to explore darkness. That’s the way I see it.’ – Denis Villeneuve

‘I still don’t love the darkness, though I’ve learned to smile in it a little bit, now and then.’ – Billy Crystal

‘Within the macho-melodrama tropes of the superhero genre, it’s fair to say ‘Watchmen’ stands out for its rich entertainment, its darkness, and its lurid pleasures. Its vividly drawn panels, moody colors and lush imagery make its popularity well-deserved, if disproportionate.’ – Lydia Millet

‘I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.’ – Ethan Canin

‘Each day is a different length of time and that gives a different length to the cusp between light and darkness or darkness and light.’ – James Turrell

‘You’ll have to forgive me this boldness, but I think women are very fortunate that men exist! The gods are very wise and certainly knew what they were doing. They created the sun and the moon, light and darkness, the eagle and the serpent, all for the same reason. They are perfect complements and the mechanism we use to reach heaven.’ – Laura Esquivel

‘When you’re writing about difficult things and darker issues, it’s nice to offer some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. Some sense of hope. Sometimes, the best way to do that is by offering it in the music, so that you can dance your way out of the darkness.’ – Jens Lekman

‘I think all the best songs do that: they offer some sort of hope and light in the darkness.’ – Jens Lekman

‘Everybody knows someone like that: wonderful, attractive people full of passion and ideals. You envy them, but you know there’s a dark side, which is brutal and cruel and violent. That dark side informs what’s wonderful about them, and the passion and rage inform the darkness; they’re inseparable.’ – David Thewlis

‘Tim Burton is an artist who has had a huge influence on me. I definitely share his sensibility. It’s a joyful approach to darkness.’ – Elizabeth Marvel

‘I think a broader audience is really amazing. If there’s no need for curse words or darkness, why go there? Why not make it PG?’ – Allison Schroeder

‘No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there’s an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence’s taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis’s, but you would still not call her hellish.’ – Howard Jacobson

‘Things happen in ‘If This is a Man’ that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in ‘King Lear’, or Conrad in ‘The Heart of Darkness’.’ – Howard Jacobson

‘My earlier books, ‘The Oath,’ ‘This Present Darkness’ were pretty straight adventure. ‘The Visitation’ is like a deeper book, more thought-provoking. It probes at character more.’ – Frank Peretti

‘Strangely, I have a huge aversion to movies that try to teach healthy people an abusive lesson about the darkness in the world.’ – Patty Jenkins

‘It’s a fantastic mirror to us to engage with art, to engage with paintings that are about tragedy, to go see Shakespearean comedies, to read a Greek play… We have always investigated the lightness and darkness of the human soul, in all these forms. So why not do it on television?’ – Holly Hunter

‘When you’re allowed to tell stories with ambiguity and darkness and things that are still unresolved, that’s the dream scenario as opposed to having to fit into a more procedural mode or something a little more conventional. That’s not what’s working on TV right now.’ – Marti Noxon

‘I am learning that in life it is OK to travel in darkness, not knowing what your next move is.’ – Cobie Smulders

‘I’ve had a very happy life, and although I have had tragedy, I’ve never suffered from any darkness.’ – Ronnie Corbett

‘There was this darkness about being from New Jersey.’ – Jack Antonoff

‘I can’t tell my people that you will get power only from 6 A.M. to 5 P.M., and after that, we live in darkness. You need 24-hour power; you need a baseload, and that baseload for India is coal. We are looking at clean coal technologies to reduce the impact of pollution.’ – Piyush Goyal

‘I don’t take myself seriously in the slightest, so it does amaze me that I’ve ended up being in all these very dark, sinister plays. But I love it because, touch wood, I’m lucky enough not to have that level of darkness in my life.’ – Jack Lowden

‘I always want to abandon myself to my characters, and I never knew if I was actually abandoning myself to Lady Macbeth. I was scared to enter the darkness. Almost every day, I would go back home and be like, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing?’ I had no idea.’ – Marion Cotillard

‘There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it.’ – Jesmyn Ward

‘There’s the way that light shows in darkness, and it is extremely beautiful. And I think it essentializes the experience of being human, to see light in darkness.’ – Emil Ferris

‘The sense of crisis is everything for Trump – even if it’s largely invented. His depiction of darkness justifies his candidacy, the need to violently shake the system. His ability to conjure fear is what distinguished him from all those career pols he has vanquished. And it suits his ego.’ – Franklin Foer

‘I like stories about people who have to go into darkness for a good reason and then have to figure out how to deal with the darkness that seeps into their souls.’ – Michael Connelly

‘I think Roald Dahl had the rarest combination of talking to kids about complex emotions, and he was able to show you that the world of kids was sophisticated, complex, and had a lot more darkness than adults ever want to remember.’ – Guillermo del Toro

‘I remember when Heath Ledger talked about playing the Joker… I always used to look out of the side of my eye, going, ‘Yeah, actors.’ But there really is a darkness when you are playing someone psychotic – you have to go there mentally.’ – Cuba Gooding, Jr.

‘I’ve always liked using humor, but what I had to with ‘Chewing Gum’ was take out a lot of darkness so it would be a bit more feel-good.’ – Michaela Coel

‘I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that’s absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.’ – Colson Whitehead

‘No one is born a terrorist, but the route to become one is surprisingly easy. We need to listen to those who have been there, and those who have made their way back, if we want to stop others from taking their first steps down this same path into darkness.’ – Deeyah Khan

‘Human darkness fascinates me; I find it intriguing. And there are few female characters who are explored in this light.’ – Leila Slimani

‘Honestly, I would never say, ‘Oh, I’ve decided not to read ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ because I’ve seen ‘Blade Runner.’ I’ve decided not to read ‘Neuromancer’ because I’ve seen ‘Blade Runner.”’ – Laeta Kalogridis

”Session 9′ used light and darkness to create atmosphere.’ – Brad Anderson

‘We’ve got to know the Word of God. That is our absolute stability. That is our offensive weapon against the kingdom of darkness.’ – Beth Moore

‘I’m interested in people’s darkness – and humor in the darkness.’ – Tanya Saracho

‘Everyone’s lives are sort of a succession, almost like handing the baton of your life off from one person to the next to the next to the next. And hopefully, that goes on for a long time, and the changes are healthy and interesting and not, like, spiraling into darkness.’ – Robin Sloan

‘I don’t think there’s any danger of me playing Indian music. However, I did a song of George Harrison’s ‘Beware of Darkness’ that was kind of like that. That was an illusion. I was playing that on a thumbtack piano, and Jim Gordon was playing tablas. He’s an amazing player. That was as close to India as I ever got.’ – Leon Russell

‘We require, as a species, the difference between what is safe and unsafe to define ourselves. Be it in darkness or in light, where we are means nothing without the comparison to the other place – where we are not. And thus it is the difference between them that tells us who and what we are.’ – Rick Tumlinson

‘Life is passion, celebration in the face of chaos, light in the face of darkness, hope in the face of despair, and joy, for the universe without life feels nothing, is nothing, and does nothing except slowly die.’ – Rick Tumlinson

‘Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think – how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness.’ – Svetlana Alexievich

‘There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred.’ – Svetlana Alexievich

‘At every Ozzfest show, there’s horns and devils somewhere; there’s some kind of darkness somewhere. But the thing is, this is a stage, homey, and those fools are entertainers. And you know what, it shows! It’s fake.’ – Sonny Sandoval

‘In Western Catholicism, darkness was evil. In the colonial and imperial context, dark skin was always weak, powerless, subjugated. If you see these images all the time, they become commonplace, and they no longer become a spectacular or sensational thing.’ – Kerry James Marshall

‘I will never forget what happened on August 14, 2003. I know the exact sequence of where I was for every moment of that evening. It was a tragic day, and it’s burned into my memory. Many people might remember that date, vaguely, as the date of the infamous eastern seaboard blackout that plunged all of New York City into darkness.’ – Chris Gethard

‘The street I lived on for the first handful of years of my life was lined with modest, lower-middle-class houses with small front yards and cracked driveways – your typical North Jersey neighborhood, with all the odd hidden darkness that that implies.’ – Chris Gethard

‘I don’t have an end game. Being a celestial being, I live for the moment to fight the Great War, and that is to light the darkness.’ – Matt Hardy

‘I’m not someone who shies away from darkness being funny. I think that life is very dark at times, and there are things that are very funny about that.’ – Brett Gelman

‘It’s impossible to exorcise the darkness out of you. We can pretend it’s not there until something bursts.’ – Arca

‘People don’t accredit Killer Mike and El-P with having the humanity that we do. They don’t understand that the darkness and the anger that we rap about comes from a place of love, care, and concern.’ – Killer Mike

‘Darkness does not truly have sway. I think that it’s weak.’ – El-P

‘I love a little darkness at the table with just enough light from IKEA white candlesticks. Seriously! They look elegant but are simple and unscented and create mood lighting.’ – Antoni Porowski

‘It’s nice to have a kind of Batman that isn’t the ‘I work alone. I’m darkness. I am the night’ kind of thing.’ – Jason O’Mara

‘If I had something to say about my lyrics, I would say they were about different subjects concerning the darkness and the night.’ – Varg Vikernes

‘I have always connected to stories with characters that don’t fit in and have a constant internal battle between their better nature and the darkness within.’ – Matt Czuchry

‘I’ve always been attracted to more intense and darker roles, but I think there is complexity and darkness in comedies as well.’ – Jeremy Sisto

‘I have a certain comfort with the darkness now because it’s been so relevant in my life for so long, with my mom being sick and finally passing and the people changing as you get bigger and bigger. So ‘A Certain Comfort’ is about that. You can bring all the evil you want – I’ma make it disappear.’ – Tech N9ne

‘My favorite zany horror flick is ‘Evil Dead 2.’ Sam Raimi is awesome! I saw this back in the day when I was younger. ‘Evil Dead’ was actually scary, and ‘Evil Dead 2’ was zany as hell. I don’t really watch ‘Army of Darkness’ though.’ – Tech N9ne

‘Everybody’s darkness is different. My darkness came from my mom having pancreatitis and almost dyin’. And what I noticed was that the darkness ain’t goin’ nowhere.’ – Tech N9ne

‘When you look at the teachings of the Bible, it’s pretty dark with Revelations, the Holy Ghost and everything, so hence the darkness upon me on my records.’ – Tech N9ne

‘It feels really good to be the bad guy, and ‘The Darkness’ is as bad as it gets.’ – Mike Patton

‘I will make a joke about any of my family members, about me, about my wife, if I really thought that I’m doing it to be funny. If there’s some darkness to it, or I think it’s ill-willed or mean or not cool, then I won’t do it.’ – Carlos Mencia

‘I’ll never forget getting my first Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chain records, and hearing that wonderful, beautiful darkness. And the rhythmic intensity, that’s what attracted me more than anything else.’ – David Draiman

‘To be perfectly honest with you, I think that The Darkness is a joke, and that’s, unfortunately, exactly what the world wants.’ – David Draiman

‘The folk that you get on Radio 1 isn’t the sort of thing that I’m into: it’s kind of too uptempo and jaunty for me. I prefer a bit of atmosphere and a bit of darkness.’ – Matt Berry

‘I prefer complete darkness while sleeping at my house. If I’m staying in a hotel, I keep the lights on.’ – Kirti Kulhari

‘The greater the darkness, the better the drama.’ – Nicolas Winding Refn

‘I can’t let darkness be what guides my decisions. I can’t let that be what guides how I treat people. I can’t let that be what drives my art, either.’ – Flying Lotus

‘Without music and creativity, I’d need other forms of therapy. But for me, the life process is the process of healing yourself. ‘Break the Night’ is about offering hope to people, about breaking through the darkness.’ – Richard Ashcroft

‘I’m not against shock and horror. In fact, I really belive in facing the dark realities of our time as the first step in coming out of denial. So we have to look into the darkness.’ – Chris Jordan

‘With the police thriller genre, people come to it with an expectation. It allows you to get away with a bit of violence, edginess, darkness.’ – Jed Mercurio

‘The doctor part of me recognises the light and shade of medical life, but the writer in me is more attracted by the darkness, perhaps because it is the road less travelled.’ – Jed Mercurio

‘My faith in God is totally… there’s nothing on this planet that can change my faith and love for God. Because I believe that’s who kept me strong, who kept me going through all the darkness and brought me through the darkness into the light.’ – Charles Bradley

‘When I use the word ‘Satan,’ it doesn’t stand for a guy with horns. To me, that word means the powers of the unknown, the powers of darkness.’ – King Diamond

‘I think for something to be beautiful, it has to have some darkness in it; otherwise, it’s just pretty. And pretty does not interest me at all.’ – Johan Renck

‘I’m drawn to stuff with a certain darkness, and darkness with beauty within it.’ – Johan Renck

‘I’m drawn to the dark but not the nihilistic aspects, the relentless parts, of darkness.’ – Johan Renck

‘We are one people, and we cannot let the power of darkness or Power, Priviledge, and Control – destroy the Light.’ – Shiva Ayyadurai

‘Hate crimes are still happening. No matter how evolved we think society is going, there seems to be a winding back, especially in this day and age where these old values seem to be emerging from the darkness.’ – Andy Muschietti

‘I don’t like darkness in everything. I like my superheroes in primary colors, and fun.’ – Genndy Tartakovsky

‘I guess I have an affinity towards darkness, the dark side.’ – Betty Gabriel

‘The Lantos Human Rights Prize is intended to serve as a beacon of hope, justice and human decency in a world too often covered in a shroud of darkness.’ – Joshua Wong

‘Todd Solondz is a film maker I’ve always loved because of how he balances darkness, humour and surrealism in his films.’ – Zawe Ashton

‘Along with the music, there is a large part of my father’s legacy that has to do with what he had to say. What he believed in, what he stood for, the understanding of his own darkness, the faith that he had that drove him, and the great love that he had for people.’ – John Carter Cash

‘My father was always much more willing to laugh than to go to the darkness.’ – John Carter Cash

‘When I was around 12 or 13 my older brother had this friend who was a goth. He was dressed all in black… You know like super, super goth! I was just so drawn to that darkness and weirdness. I just wanted to rebel. And now that I think about it, rebel against what? I mean I have lovely parents and brother and things were always very great.’ – MO

‘The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.’ – Robert Eggers

‘The thing is with these members, especially Omar and Tlaib, honestly, I feel like their hearts are filled with darkness. AOC’s heart might be filled more with cotton candy and unicorns.’ – Lee Zeldin

‘When it comes to explaining the phenomenon of right-wing populism, liberals are likely to argue both that the populist era has exposed a darkness always present at the heart of conservative politics and that a toxic, post-truth new-media ecosystem has greased the skids for President Trump, Brexit and the rest.’ – Ross Douthat

‘If an artist doesn’t have anything to say, he’ll be quiet. Or he’ll yell into the darkness until he finds something and hears something back.’ – Christopher Jackson

‘It was a really lucky childhood and while, yeah, there were bits of darkness, which is known about because my mother has made no bones about her struggle with depression, the overriding memory of it is a very happy, good one.’ – Sophie Dahl

‘I love a sleep mask, havin’ total darkness is essential for good sleep, you know, cuttin’ that light out of your eyes.’ – Tony Gonzalez

‘We used to have quirky weird bands that made dance music like the Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode and I think people have still got an appetite for that type of music-melody and darkness.’ – Olly Alexander

‘I’ve got a lot of darkness in me.’ – Maria Brink

‘Mystery is great, that’s what art is and I think when you can leave your imagination to grow, it’s good. I just don’t like it if it’s super bad because I’m a loving person, I love everybody and human beings. I do have a darkness to me, but I would never do bad things or wish bad things on people, or hurt anything or anyone.’ – Maria Brink

‘Black Widow’ is a metaphor for this innocent young girl who gets infected with life, traumas, experiences, and the balance of light and darkness. She becomes this poised and powerful creature. That’s the album.’ – Maria Brink

‘There is no meaning to light if there is no darkness.’ – Puneet Issar

‘I lost my legs in a big crash and, of course, after that, there were times, not so much of darkness, but certainly times where it was very uncertain of what my future would hold.’ – Alex Zanardi

‘I’m not one of those actors who wants to live in some kind of dark character and wants to live in the darkness so much that no one around me has any fun.’ – Steven Pasquale

‘I don’t like the darkness and sleep with the light on.’ – Shirley Ballas

‘Rather than a taste for the macabre, I like the full range of human emotion in a story, which means darkness and light. It means warmth, but it also potentially means scares.’ – Travis Knight

‘Everything I’ve tried to do at Laika, searching for an artful blend of darkness and light, intensity and warmth, humour and heart, I wanted to bring to the Transformers franchise.’ – Travis Knight

‘At LAIKA, we try to find an artful balance of darkness and light, intensity and warmth, and humor and heart. The idea of being able to bring that philosophy to ‘Bumblebee’ was really exciting.’ – Travis Knight

‘You see it in the stuff I’ve done at Laika: I’ve always tried to make movies that have an artful blend of darkness and light, intensity and warmth. That have a thinking brain and a strong beating heart at the centre of it.’ – Travis Knight

‘Sleep is the secret of life! I must have a comfortable bed, a room at exactly 60 degrees, and complete darkness like a tomb to sleep. If I don’t get 10 hours, then I’m miserable and I make everyone around me miserable.’ – Demis Roussos

‘Since many years, I realized that I have a darker side in me, even though I still believe I’m a very positive person. But still, there is still darkness that makes me write music and create in general, and it affects everything that I do. I believe it’s a beautiful darkness.’ – Tarja Turunen

‘I could write songs on the beach, but the interior darkness, we have it all. We have it.’ – Tarja Turunen

”Shadow and Bone’ is a fantasy set in a country inspired by Tsarist Russia that has been literally torn apart by a swathe of nearly impenetrable darkness.’ – Leigh Bardugo

‘Let women write horror. Let women write darkness, let women write trauma, without having to carve out their own trauma to justify it.’ – Leigh Bardugo

‘I’ve always said I was born in the storm. I just had to find a way out of it, find the clearing, and believe the clouds would blow away and the darkness would become something else.’ – Aaron Pedersen

‘I remember one episode trying to be really gassed about The Darkness and thinking, ‘This just feels really forced.” – Miquita Oliver

‘When I was in school, the first song I learned was of Simon and Garfunkel and The Beatles. I couldn’t even pronounce their names but I was singing ‘Hello Darkness my old friend’ and ‘Yellow Submarine.” – Neha Bhasin

‘Prince of Darkness?’ I don’t know what the hell I was doing.’ – Big Daddy Kane

‘I don’t believe in God, so I’d say that laughter is one of the only true weapons for fighting against real darkness, grief and loss.’ – David Baddiel

‘My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.’ – Giles Coren

‘I am extremely scared of water, darkness and am claustrophobic.’ – Rupali Ganguly

‘It truly is the most amazing Indian festival. I love Diwali because of what it symbolises – it’s a festival of light and how it takes over darkness and brings positivity into our lives. That’s the essence of Diwali and it’s beautiful.’ – Catherine Tresa

‘The total cost for ‘Edge of Darkness’ was something like $2.3 million which is actually quite a bit by British standards yet, we still managed to shoot some scenes eight or 10 times, because the director wanted at least three good takes of each scene so he’d have some options.’ – Joe Don Baker

‘Every false religion is going to be free because it’s linked to the kingdom of darkness that operates in the world. And Christians, whatever the label of religious freedom might be in its broadest sense, Christians are always the target even with religious freedom, of the hostility of sinners.’ – John MacArthur

‘It is unloving to leave people in darkness and error.’ – John MacArthur

‘I fear everything. Darkness, light, fear of insecurity, fear of women, fear of conversation.’ – Lee Evans

‘That’s Not True’ is about trying to find the positivity and light in the darkness that can sometimes eclipse humanity.’ – Skip Marley

‘There’s nothing like heartbreak to make you magnify yourself with the most poisonous of lenses – insecurities you’ve always had swell up tenfold in the darkness, and you find yourself desperately unpicking every thread of your being.’ – Maisie Peters

‘When I was growing up, it was good to have somebody that could relate with the darkness that I was going through, but at the same time if it just left me there, it actually was destructive in my life.’ – Lacey Sturm

‘Out of the darkness of 9/11 came a bright moment of clarity and unity on 9/12 that we must never forget.’ – Brian Mast