Atmosphere Quotes

“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The house was very quiet, and the fog—we are in November now—pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.”
― Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn

“From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and here, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque.

He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! ("A Tough Tussle")”
― Ambrose Bierce, Ghost Stories

“I can't be expected to produce deathless prose in an atmosphere of gloom and eucalyptus.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“Everyone carries an atmosphere about him. It may be healthful and invigorating, or it may be unwholesome and depressing. It may make a little spot of the world a sweeter, better, safer place to live in; or it may make it harder for those to live worthily and beautifully who dwell within its circle.”
― J.R. Miller

“When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“If we assume that the last breath of, say, Julius Caesar has by now become thoroughly scattered through the atmosphere, then the chances are that each of us inhales one molecule of it with every breath we take.”
― James Jeans, An Introduction to the Kinetic Theory of Gases

“States of the atmosphere pass into us as water through the meshes of a sieve, and storms occur in us before they break upon the world without, creating restless sensations. ("Absolute Evil")”
― Julian Hawthorne, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“What a night it was! The jagged masses of heavy dark cloud were rolling at intervals from horizon to horizon, and thin white wreaths covered the stars. Through all the rush of the cloud river the moon swam, breasting the waves and disappearing again in the darkness.

I walked up and down, drinking in the beauty of the quiet earth and the changing sky. The night was absolutely silent. Nothing seemed to be abroad. There was no scurrying of rabbits, or twitter of the half-asleep birds. And though the clouds went sailing across the sky, the wind that drove them never came low enough to rustle the dead leaves in the woodland paths. Across the meadows I could see the church tower standing out black and grey against the sky. ("Man Size In Marble")”
― E. Nesbit, Ghost Stories

“The place was silent and - aware.”
― P.C. Wren

“He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.
But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting?
He turned the corner.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The soft-spoken words fell off the side of the bed, emptying to the floor like powder.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“A restaurant on the moon could not have had less atmosphere.”
― Geoff Dyer, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It: Essays

“The viewless air seemed to be flocking with hidden listeners. The very clearness and the crystal silence were their ambush. He alone seemed to be the target of cold and hostile scrutiny. There was not a breath to breathe in this crisp, pale sunshine. It was all too rare, too thin. The shadows lay like wings everlastingly folded.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“His goal (Bezos's)was not just to make browsing for books easy, but an enjoyable experience. “People don’t just buy books because they need books,” he has said. “There are products like that. Pharmaceuticals are that way. Nobody enjoys browsing the Preparation H counter. But people will gladly spend hours in a bookstore, so you have to make the shopping experience fun and engaging.”
― Richard L. Brandt, One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com

“The yard twinkled as though several hundred obliging fireflies had decided to attend the party.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“I thought I was getting away from politics for a while. But I now realise that the vuvuzela is to these World Cup blogs what Julius Malema is to my politics columns: a noisy, but sadly unavoidable irritant. With both Malema and the vuvuzela, their importance is far overstated. Malema: South Africa's Robert Mugabe? I think not. The vuvuzela: an archetypal symbol of 'African culture?' For African civilisation's sake, I seriously hope not.

Both are getting far too much airtime than they deserve. Both have thrust themselves on to the world stage through a combination of hot air and raucous bluster. Both amuse and enervate in roughly equal measure. And both are equally harmless in and of themselves — though in Malema's case, it is the political tendency that he represents, and the right-wing interests that lie behind his diatribes that is dangerous. With the vuvu I doubt if there are such nefarious interests behind the scenes; it may upset the delicate ears of the middle classes, both here and at the BBC, but I suspect that South Africa's democracy will not be imperilled by a mass-produced plastic horn.”
― Richard Calland

“The moon rose above the canopy and a dreamy mist swirled around our knees as we danced, fingers entwined and hearts in sync with the universe; just a prince and his princess, a boy and a girl, learning to love in a beautiful world.”
― Aishabella Sheikh, Entwined

“For the record, the vuvuzela is not my enemy — and I even have, for reasons of self-defence installed a mini-vuvu with surprisingly powerful performance levels around my neck — though I miss hearing the crescendo of noise from the crowd that should accompany a promising attack on goal or a goal itself. Instead, of course, there is the monotone drone — a constant that belies the ebbs and flows of a game.”
― Richard Calland

“Lumpini Park at night: love at its cheapest, but the incidence of HIV is said to be over 60 per cent. In the darkness: furtive movement on benches and on the grass, muted moans and whispers, rustlings of large animals in heat, the intensity of the atomic fusion of sec and death (highly addictive, they say).”
― John Burdett, Bangkok Tattoo

“Life can be spent in an atmosphere of continuous encouragement, you will ignore the complex and it will disappear”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Person's behavior reflects nothing but the mirror of an aura he/she brought up in. Never doubt their integrity because of their insecurities.”
― Surjeet Kumar

“I remember when I was very young how, in the big living room of the house in San Francisco, my mother's photograph, which stood all by itself on the mantelpiece, seemed to rule the room. It was as though her photograph proved her spirit dominated that air and controlled us all. I remember the shadows gathering in the far corners of the room, in which I never felt at home, and my father washed in the gold light which spilled down on him from the tall lamp which stood beside his easy chair.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“Rachael stared into the rich, lush forest, longing growing in her with a strength that shook her. She heard the continual call of the birds, so many of them, saw them flitting from branch to branch, always busy, always in flight. She had a mad desire to dive out of the boat and swim away to disappear into the dark interior.”
― Christine Feehan, Wild Rain

“I've heard the words "BUT THEY ARE FAMILY" one time too many times. My intent is to create a positive family atmosphere that no one will have to put "BUT THEY ARE" in front of ever again.”
― Christine E. Szymanski

“Wokeism, in its zealous pursuit of social justice, often inadvertently undermines the very principles it claims to champion. While the intention may be noble, the consequence is a stifling atmosphere where free speech becomes collateral damage. The suppression of dissenting voices, even through well-intentioned means, risks creating an echo chamber devoid of critical discourse. It's crucial to recognize that the path to a just society lies not in silencing opposition but in fostering an environment where diverse perspectives can coexist, allowing for the robust exchange of ideas that fuels progress.”
― James William Steven Parker

“Cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a fear in the fabric of reality.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became