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You’re not a morning person, are you? (Simone)
I’m a Dream-Hunter/demon. By my very nature I’m nocturnal. That big yellow ball in the sky offends me to the very core of my being. (Xypher)
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Sherrilyn Kenyon (Dream Chaser (Dark-Hunter, #13; Dream-Hunter, #3))
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She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.
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Kazuo Ishiguro (Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall)
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To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are dreamwrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.
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Thomas Hardy (Far From the Madding Crowd)
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The notion of good and bad is only in people's minds for there is only virtue and excess. Happiness and wisdom are virtues, sadness and foolishness are vices. "Good and bad" is an ethical judgment of "decent" persons, and criticizing is their vice.
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Insidious Nocturne
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It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim--even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon--feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. this is in my opinion why writers--like insomniacs--are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.
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Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)
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HEARING A FLUTE ON A SPRING NIGHT IN LUOYANG
From whose home secretly flies the sound of a jade flute?
It's lost amid the spring wind which fills Luoyang city.
In the middle of this nocturne I remember the snapped willow,
What person would not start to think of home!
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Li Bai
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You know, Raymond, when you're at a party, at a dance. And it's maybe a slow dance, and you're with the person you really want to be with, and the rest of the room's supposed to vanish. But somehow it doesn't. It just doesn't. You know there's no one half as nice as the guy in your arms. And yet.... well, there are all these people everywhere else in the room. They don't leave you alone. They keep shouting and waving and doing daft things just to attract your attention. "Oi! How can you be satisfied with that?1 You can do much better! Look over here!" It's like they're shouting things like that all the time. And so it gets hopeless, you just can't dance quietly with your guy. Do you know what I mean, Raymond?
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Kazuo Ishiguro (Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall)
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How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females.
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Richard von Krafft-Ebing (Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Legal Study)
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Maybe I am just an empty, futile person, he thought. But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, even if for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. The birds like that empty, dim, silent place. If that were true, then maybe he should be happy he was hollow.
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Haruki Murakami
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Quan fa fred, encara que sigui a la primavera, les passes nocturnes fan una altra fressa, com si el fred fes soroll. Això va pensar l'Adrià mentre es dirigien en silenci cap a l'hotel. Passes nocturnes de dues persones felices
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Jaume Cabré (Jo confesso)
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It is desirable that the inmate should not have at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose content might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape.
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Vladimir Nabokov (Invitation to a Beheading)
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It was always easier to see Cabe in the half-shadow of night rather than the full relief of day. Darkness brought out the truth of him. Some people were like that; nocturnal, in a split-personality kind of way. Cabe’s body woke up in the morning, with the sun; but his mind woke up at night, with the moon.
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Jane Washington (Lead Heart (Seraph Black, #3))
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Maybe I am just an empty, futile person, he thought. But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, if even for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. The birds like that empty, dim, silent place. If that were true, then maybe he should be happy he was shallow.
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Haruki Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage)
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The form the picture had taken was not unreservedly welcome to the patient’s conscious mind. Luckily, however, while painting it Miss X had discovered that two factors were involved. These, in her own words, were reason and the eyes. Reason always wanted to make the picture as it thought it ought to be; but the eyes held fast to their vision and finally forced the picture to come out as it actually did and not in accordance with rationalistic expectations. Her reason, she said, had really intended a daylight scene, with the sunshine melting the sphere free, but the eyes favoured a nocturne with “shattering, dangerous lightning.” This realization helped her to acknowledge the actual result of her artistic efforts and to admit that it was in fact an objective and impersonal process and not a personal relationship.
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C.G. Jung (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works, Vol 9i))
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That’s how our eyes face, too. Primates are not ambush predators but largely vegetarian browsers, and we’ve used our centrally located eyes for very different purposes: scanning bushes for ripe fruit at close range, and much more recently, for reading the facial expressions of others. Cats’ eye placement is a major part of what makes their faces appear so person-like to us. (Owls, another visual nocturnal predator, have similar facial composition, which perhaps explains why we prefer them to, say, vultures.)
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Abigail Tucker (The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World (A Gift for Cat Lovers))
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Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions—from the theory of evolution to van Gogh’s sunflowers to the personal computer—came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there. Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity the theory of relativity W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” Chopin’s nocturnes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Peter Pan Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm The Cat in the Hat Charlie Brown Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind Google Harry Potter* As
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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The most intriguing correlations obtained by the Minnesota study were also among the most unexpected. Social and political attitudes between twins reared apart were just as concordant as those between twins reared together: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. Religiosity and faith were also strikingly concordant: twins were either both faithful or both nonreligious. Traditionalism, or “willingness to yield to authority,” was significantly correlated. So were characteristics such as “assertiveness, drive for leadership, and a taste for attention.” Other studies on identical twins continued to deepen the effect of genes on human personality and behavior. Novelty seeking and impulsiveness were found to have striking degrees of correlation. Experiences that one might have imagined as intensely personal were, in fact, shared between twins. “Empathy, altruism, sense of equity, love, trust, music, economic behavior, and even politics are partially hardwired.” As one startled observer wrote, “A surprisingly high genetic component was found in the ability to be enthralled by an esthetic experience such as listening to a symphonic concert.” Separated by geographic and economic continents, when two brothers, estranged at birth, were brought to tears by the same Chopin nocturne at night, they seemed to be responding to some subtle, common chord struck by their genomes.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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In Miss Miller’s fantasy, too, there is an inner necessity that compels it to go on from the horse-sacrifice to the sacrifice of the hero. Whereas the former symbolizes the renunciation of biological drives, the latter has the deeper and ethically more valuable meaning of a human self-sacrifice, a renunciation of egohood. In her case, of course, this is true only in a metaphorical sense, since it is not the author of the story but its hero, Chiwantopel, who offers himself and is voluntarily sacrificed. The morally significant act is delegated to the hero, while Miss Miller only looks on admiringly and applaudingly, without, it seems, realizing that her animus-figure is constrained to do what she herself so signally fails to do. The advance from the animal sacrifice to the human sacrifice is therefore only an idea, and when Miss Miller plays the part of a pious spectator of this imaginary sacrificial act, her participation is without ethical significance. As is usual in such cases, she is totally unconscious of what it means when the hero, the vehicle of the vitally important magical action, perishes. When that happens, the projection falls away and the threatening sacrificial act recoils upon the subject herself, that is, upon the personal ego of the dreamer. In what form the drama will then run to an end it is impossible to predict. Nor, in the case of Miss Miller, owing to the lack of material and my ignorance of her personality, did I foresee, or venture to assume, that it would be a psychosis which would form the companion piece to Chiwantopel’s sacrifice. It was, in fact, a κατοχή—a total surrender, not to the positive possibilities of life, but to the nocturnal world of the unconscious, a débâcle similar to the one that overtook her hero.
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C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
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The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.
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Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
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Growing up, I had three amazing dogs with distinct
personalities. One of them was a randy mid-sized German spitz called Snoopy, father to countless puppies within a one- mile radius of our home in the cantonment. No lock could keep
Snoopy in, no wall was too high. In the summer months, he slept besides his knell in the garden. His nocturnal rendezvous became the talk of town when he snuck into a fellow officer’s garden to sow his wild oats with Debbie the Doberman, who was twice his size. Snoopy was as unapologetic as my mother
was embarrassed when the offi cer’s wife came home. She feared for Snoopy’s life, she told my mother diplomatically.
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Nidhie Sharma (INVICTUS)
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I have never had much luck understanding the hidden messages behind my nocturnal imaginings. Sometimes, I could brush them off in the light of day like so many cobwebs—vague and insubstantial. Others were not so easy to dismiss. They lingered like a damp fog chilling my bones. Some, like the dreams of phone calls from some unnamed person, return again and again to haunt me.
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Nancy Christie (Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories)
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Relating to you in your nocturnal dreams is one of the Holy Spirit’s favorite ways of working with people. But sometimes His Voice may simply come to you in the form of an idea from another person that rings true for you.
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Gary R. Renard (The Disappearance of the Universe: Straight Talk about Illusions, Past Lives, Religion, Sex, Politics, and the Miracles of Forgiveness)
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X was a nocturnal woman, but also a diurnal one—in fact, it seemed she never grew tired, or jet-lagged, not even weary on a warm afternoon—while I've always just been a regular person, tired at certain intervals.
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Catherine Lacey (Biography of X)
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Gargoyles are designed to protect, so when someone makes a request of us and seals that request with an offering of stone, we are bound to that person until the request is fulfilled.
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Kristen Painter (The Gargoyle Gets His Girl (Nocturne Falls, #3))
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It is never said, but it is clear that it is over, that our lives, bound together for so long, will now be lived apart. Everything that we were, the whole magical, horrible opera, is now over. We are only a table apart but we’re in different worlds. He seems less like a person and more like a figment from a dream I once had, some nocturnal wonder I cannot revive after sleep, only remember.
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Bill Clegg (Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man: A Memoir)
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Damage to the frontal lobes, whether through tumour, types of dementia or tamping iron, is known to cause personality change, and suggests that the frontal lobes have a fundamental role in our social behaviour and planning.
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Guy Leschziner (The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep)
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Spotlighting for animals at night, you’re looking for their luminous eyes. Eyeshine is technically an effect of the tapetum lucidum, a layer of tissue behind the retina of some vertebrate animals that reflects light, allowing the eye’s photoreceptors a second chance to process incoming signals. This gives nocturnal species their superior low-light vision, and the tissue is highly visible: if you direct light at an animal with a tapetum lucidum, its eyes will seem to glow in the dark. The color varies by species, and you can often guess the type of animal by its eyeshine. Cat and dog eyes glow iridescent green; horses and cows are blue; fish are white; and coyotes, rodents, and birds are red. (Primates, including humans, don’t have a tapetum lucidum, so you won’t see any eyeshine by spotlighting a person. The redeye effect in powerful flash photos is a reflection of blood vessels at the back of the eyeball.)
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Noah Strycker (Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World)