Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End:

“You will ruin your eyes, Henrietta, in such bad light,” her mother warns. And she’s right! Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.

Cinematographer Néstor Almendros, on shooting Malick’s Days of Heaven in Alberta:

On the other hand, in North America the air is more transparent and the light more violent.

Seamus Heaney, from the “Finn Episode” in his translation of Beowulf:

                               Wind and water
raged with storms,
                               wave and shingle
were shackled in ice
                               until another year
appeared in the yard
                               as it does to this day,
the seasons constant,
                               the wonder of light
coming over us.
                               Then winter was gone,
earth’s lap grew lovely,
                               longing woke
in the cooped-up exile
                               for a voyage home —

Robert Penn Warren, “Lullaby: Moonlight Lingers”:

Sleep, and let me now think
Of moon-frost white on the black boughs of cedar,
White moon-rinse on meadow, whiter than clover,
And at moon-dark stone, how water woke
In a wink of glory, then slid on to sleep.
Sleep, let this moon provoke
Moonlight more white on that landscape lost in the heart’s homely deep.
Son, past grief, sleep.