"In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round." - Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“He was a man of the night, a man of the shadows, and he knew that the shadows were the only place where a man could be truly himself.” - Bram Stoker, Dracula

"The heights of popularity and the depths of solitude are often found in the same city; for where the crowd is thickest, the individual may find himself most alone, and where the stone is grandest, the soul may feel its own smallness." - David Hume

"Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house." - Edward Hopper

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

"An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom." - Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush

"The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. K. stood a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him." - Franz Kafka, The Castle

"In the middle of a city, the silence of the soul is a weight. To be a solitary observer is to witness the world without the burden of participating in its illusions." - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

"When the evening is spread out against the sky. Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats." T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves." - Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting

"I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain - and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane." - Robert Frost, Acquainted with the Night

"After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams." - Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

"We live, as we dream – alone." - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night." - Albert Camus

"A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret..." - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." - Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

"At the end of the street, the night was beginning to take possession of the town, and the street-lamps were being lit. The air was still warm. The few people who were out were walking in a leisurely way, and the noise of their footsteps on the pavement seemed to echo the silence of the sky." Camus

"The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance comer, though unknown, gave off light. Then the twilight obscurity would fall again." - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

"The murky labyrinth of those subterranean streets, where the very air seems to have been imprisoned for centuries, and the light of day never penetrates." - Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

"There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light, sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more." - Conan Doyle

"In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time." - Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd." - Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

"When you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help: all the past in the world is of no use." - Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

"There is a solitude of space A solitude of sea A solitude of death, but these Society shall be Compared with that profounder site That polar privacy A soul admitted to itself Finite Infinity." - Emily Dickinson

"For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite." - Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

"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." - Thomas Hardy. Far From The Madding Crowd

"There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude that gives everything back its value. At this moment of adorable silence, I do not know what I could wish for rather than this continued presence of self with self." - Albert Camus

"Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny, and this destiny is a web of stupidity and ignorance, of the indifference of everyone and each for all." — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

If you find yourself with a spare moment or two over the next few days, head down to the @whitespace76 for the @streetphotosocial exhibition. A cracking collection of Edinburgh images, including a photo you may have seen around here. Great work all round.

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine." - Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place." - Ursula K. Le Guin

"The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile..." - Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

"And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted - nevermore!" - Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

"Where solitude ends, there begins the marketplace; and where the marketplace begins, there begins too the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of poisonous flies" - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"We Scots, Rebus thought, we're not very good at going public. We store up our true feelings like fuel for long winter nights of whisky and recrimination. So little of us ever reaches the surface, it's a wonder we exist at all." - Ian Rankin, Mortal Causes

"We Scots, Rebus thought, we're not very good at going public. We store up our true feelings like fuel for long winter nights of whisky and recrimination. So little of us ever reaches the surface, it's a wonder we exist at all." - Ian Rankin, Mortal Causes

"The dark is not an end, but a beginning. It is the light that reveals what the darkness has hidden, and the shadows that give depth to the world." - Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

"A flash of lightning... then night! Fleeting beauty, by whose glance I was suddenly reborn, will I see you no more before eternity?" - Charles Baudelaire, "To a Passer-by"

"A multitude of people and yet a solitude." - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

"It was one of those days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade." - Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

"The day was returning, and with it the sense of life and light which had been so long absent from the world." - Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

"Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotise." - Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

"Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward..." - RLS

"The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains." - Ray Bradbury, The Long Rain

"The city is a pit. The bottom is dark, but the top is light. One struggles to reach the top, but the mud pulls one back." - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

"Teeming city, city full of dreams, Where spectres in broad day accost the passer-by! Mystery flows everywhere like sap In the narrow channels of the mighty giant." - Charles Baudelaire, The Seven Old Men

"A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly in the dripping mist. The public-houses were just closing, and dim men and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors. From some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter." - The Picture of Dorian Gray

"Night and day the conquering engines rumbled at their distant work, or, advancing smoothly to their journey’s end, and gliding like tame dragons into the allotted corners grooved out to the inch for their reception, stood bubbling and trembling there." - Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

"If you gave yourself to darkness, you might start to make out shapes invisible to others, but without being able to define them: the movement behind a curtain, the shadows in an alleyway." - Ian Rankin, Set in Darkness