It's always darkest before it turns absolutely pitch black.

It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before.

It is always darkest before the dawn.

Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

This is night, Diddykins. That's what we call it when it goes all dark like this.

And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

What’s blacker than black? Does summer shade have a shadow? Is that how loneliness looks and where it lurks?

Indeed how might it be if things revealed their colors only when (in our terms) no light fell on them - if, for example, the sky were black? Could we not then say, only by black light do they appear to us in their full colors?

The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.

But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

The nearer the dawn
the darker the night.

No matter how hard you fight the darkness, every light casts a shadow, and the closer you get to the light, the darker that shadow becomes.