Life & Wisdom Quote by William McFee

Darkness isn’t just a setting here; it’s a tactic. McFee’s line understands a social truth that still feels embarrassingly current: intimacy often needs an alibi. In the dark, the self gets plausible deniability. You can confess without having to watch your confession land on someone else’s face. You can speak desire, shame, grief, tenderness - the whole messy inventory - without the added burden of performing composure.

The intent is deceptively simple: to name the small technology of secrecy that makes honesty possible. “Easier” is doing heavy lifting. McFee isn’t romanticizing darkness as mystical; he’s describing it as a lubricant for candor. The subtext is that daylight is surveillance. Eyes turn feelings into evidence. In bright rooms, we manage ourselves for the audience, even when the audience is one person we love. Darkness lowers the stakes by lowering visibility, and with it the fear of being misread. It also blurs power: when bodies are less legible, conversation can become less hierarchical, less about who’s in control.

Context matters: McFee wrote in an era when emotional restraint was a form of social literacy, especially for men, and when many kinds of desire had to route themselves through discretion. The line carries that inherited caution. It’s not just about bedtime pillow talk; it’s about how people build private worlds inside public rules. The dark becomes a temporary republic where the unsayable can be said - not because it’s safer in any real sense, but because it feels safer, and sometimes feeling safe is the only permission intimacy gets.