A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

Joyce Carol Oates

Quote Topics

Again Been Complete Darkness Fills How Immediately Light Never Strange

Quote Author

Joyce Carol Oates
American - Writer
Born: June 16, 1938

Once again you are wrong sir, darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light we can study, but not darkness. In fact we can use Newton's prism to break white light into many colors and study the various wavelengths of each color. You cannot measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light present. Isn't this correct? Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens when there is no light present.

Albert Einstein

...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

W. G. Sebald

Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light in his dreams, was always hope: the basic, moral hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, "Who? Who?"

Thomas Pynchon

I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own.

Yehuda Amichai

In each experience of my life, I have had to step out of one little space of the known light, into a large area of darkness. I had to stand awhile in the darkness, and then gradually God has given me light. But not to linger in. For as soon as that light has felt familiar, then the call has always come to step out ahead again into new darkness.

Mary McLeod Bethune

Prison does strange things to men. Although its purpose is to break the free spirit of a man, in many cases it just adds fuel to the fire that has never been and will never be extinguished.

William Powell

We all, everyone one of us, carry a star inside our chests. ...Light and darkness are always side-by-side. If you show even the slightest fear or tears to the darkness, it will immediately swell and come attacking, and swallow up the light. Serenity, in order to defeat the darkness and dark souls, you must keep the star inside your chest burning brightly at all times. That is your most important charge.

Naoko Takeuchi

Light is shallow; darkness is infinitely deep. Light is always bounded, it has boundaries. Darkness has no boundaries, it is unbounded. Light comes and goes; darkness always is. When there is light you cannot see it. When light is not there you can see it. But it is always there; you cannot cause it. Light has a cause. You burn the fire, you put on wood. When the wood is finished the light will be gone. It is caused, hence it is an effect. But darkness is not caused by anything, it is not an effect. It is uncaused eternity.

Rajneesh

And I saw darkness for weeks. It never dawned on me that I could come out of it, but you heal. Nature heals you, and you do come out of it. All of a sudden I saw a crack of light ... then all of a sudden I saw another crack of light. Then I saw forms in the light. And I recognized that there was no darkness, that in darkness there'll always be light.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it's very thrilling for me to see darkness again.

Diane Arbus

it's a complete rush to get what you've been hoping for - to get it so full and complete that it fills your senses.

Joan Bauer

The light came into the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it, but that no longer mattered because the light was now obliteration the darkness.

Ted Dekker

Does the light of the lamp shine without losing its splendour until it is extinguished; and shall the truth which is in thee and justice and temperance be extinguished before thy death?

Marcus Aurelius

Salvakalpa samadhi is like a sea of perfect light; nirvikalpa samadhi is no light, no darkness, no way to describe it. Absorption is complete, that's nirvana.