It's always darkest before the dawn

You have to have the darkness for the dawn to come

Night's darkness is the bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn.

I reached for her through the darkness, but she was gone. Like dominoes folding over, the rest of the mirrors collapsed down on top of me. The impact caused the world around me to vanish.

It was a darkness without time. It was an impenetrable darkness. To the right and left of me rose those terrible formless things of my imagination, which I could not see because there was no light. I could not see, but I dared not close my eyes lest the darkness crawl beneath my eyelids and suffocate me. I could only hear. My ears became my being and I could hear the specks of life that crawled beneath my clothing, the rotting of the great tree which rose from its three-cornered trunk above me. I could hear the darkness gathering against me and the silences that lay between the moving things.

The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.