Fog Quotes

“LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said," We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life. "

The Fog Horn blew.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn

“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“moonlight disappears down the hills
mountains vanish into fog
and i vanish into poetry.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things:" real things "which were unfrequent and priceless, simply" things "which formed the routine stuff of life; and" ghost things, "also called" fogs, "such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a" tower, "or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a" bridge. "" Real towers "and" real bridges "were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral" thing "might look or even actually become" real "or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid" fog. "When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with" ruined towers "and" broken bridges.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed [Illustrated]

“At night the fog was thick and full of light, and sometimes voices.”
― Erin Bow, Plain Kate

“Desire is like fog on a bathroom mirror -- its presence incites you to wipe the mirror, and see yourself clearly again.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Caught in the doldrums of August we may have regretted the departing summer, having sighed over the vanished strawberries and all that they signified. Now, however, we look forward almost eagerly to winter's approach. We forget the fogs, the slush, the sore throats an the price of coal, we think only of long evenings by lamplight, of the books which we are really going to read this time, of the bright shop windows and the keen edge of the early frosts.”
― Denis Mackail, Greenery Street

“I returned to the courtyard and saw that the sun had grown weaker. Beautiful and clear as it had been, the morning (as the day approached the completion of its first half) was becoming damp and misty. Heavy clouds moved from the north and were invading the top of the mountain, covering it with a light brume. It seemed to be fog, and perhaps fog was also rising from the ground, but at that altitude it was difficult to distinguish the mists that rose from below and those that come down from above. It was becoming hard to discern the bulk of the more distant buildings.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“In the morning I woke like a sloth in the fog.”
― Leslie Connor, Waiting for Normal

“The night was white-blind with fog, and Kate staggered over every stone and stumbled in every puddle, but she pushed on as fast as she could.”
― Erin Bow, Plain Kate

“February Soup by Stewart Stafford

The February fog,
Turns all into blobs,
Orange street lights,
To Valentine's Night.

When the wind strays,
Fog's mantle is grey,
Laying misty bouquets,
On barren, muddied days.

The daffodils of March,
Can cheer up Plutarch,
Adorned in Kelly green,
No sign of foggy screens.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“There is no romance if there is no fog. When everything is clear, there's no element of mystery. In The Ozarks, mystique is ubiquitous.”
― Jarod Kintz, The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks

“It’s easier to hide your smoking habit on a foggy night. Let that be a lesson for you and your secret lover.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“Standing on the deck of a San Francisco ferryboat, in a gray suit so precisely the same colour as the fog that he seems (as in a not particularly scary movie) to be a ghostly floating head”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

“Add some mystery to your morning coffee and stir in some mist. Or go full fog for that #MissMarpleFlavor. Then solve it sip by sip.”
― Jarod Kintz, The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks

“Dance critics all over the world have called my body moves, “Sculpturesque,” “As full of motion as a Rodin statue,” and “Like watching Helen Keller eat Jell-O with her elbows.” My dancing is so still and silent that it belongs to a foggy Ozarks morning.”
― Jarod Kintz, The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks

“In a Lake of Clouds, there's only one thing you can fish for: Dreams. Mostly I catch mine, but sometimes I catch yours, and I must say I am flattered to always see myself as the co-star in your subconscious fantasies.”
― Jarod Kintz, The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks

“You do not realize how bad the past relationship was until you have left and the fog of confusion clears.”
― Steven Magee

“There was fog, but behind the fog there was morning.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“Imaginative people remain distinguished....for their heavenly madness....They do not run away from chaos or the stab of grief....but by encountering and getting to grips with loss...they force it to crack open and make a sense, sanity out of that insanity....They tear apart the haze to peer through the fog...for the pen they hold...the brush they move on the canvas....takes them to chase the meaningless and resurface with a meaning.....”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

“There are people like fog, my dear friend! Suddenly you find yourself in the fog, you don't understand what it is, then the fog goes away, you look behind it, oh yes, it was like this, it was like that, now you understand!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Some people get lost in completely sunny weather and some people don't get lost in the thickest fog!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Pilgrim’s Progress by Stewart Stafford

Solitary steps in silence grim,
As waters lapped the lakeside’s rim,
In our time, before and aft,
Magpies cackled, crows laughed.

I drew level with a miasmic curtain,
In vapour folds, to views uncertain,
Sound grew thick in compensation,
I took each step with trepidation.

Sweet breath wind, fog dispersed,
Marvelling at the ground traversed,
The garden path to a shelter trite,
As hailstones on my windows bite.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Sometimes you need thick fog, yes fog is definitely a need; it wraps you up and isolate you from this world! You and the universe are left alone, there is a silence, you think about things you couldn't think of before, and you see things you couldn't see before! The fog is a journey both to oneself and to the universe. Fog is very strange because it stimulates both thoughts and non-thinking; like the pendulum of a clock, you oscillate between thinking and not thinking!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“If we cannot clear away the fog, it might be better to rise to a higher level and get above it.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“If you can see clearly in the fog, then there is no such thing as fog for you!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Of course, one is familiar with the experience of seeing something ambiguous. “Now it is the Taj Mahal—now it is fog.” And one can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled “fog.”
― Michael Frayn

“Grief transforms you into someone you can't even recognize. For some it becomes a hard swim to the shores, becoming a fight for the light...and for the rest, they remain baffled forever in the thick fog of grief...”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee