words…

The picture of a shadow is a positive thing.
John Locke

**

My Shadow

Robert Louis Stevenson
From Child’s Garden of Verses

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow–
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes goes so little that there’s none of him at all.

He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close behind me, he’s a coward you can see;
I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

**

Man’s shadow, I thought, is his vanity. Nietzsche

**

“Between the conception
and the creation
between the emotion

and the response

Falls the shadow” Joseph Conrad

**

“… I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather’s, that you can’t paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you’re the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?” Wallace Stegner

**

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you will never see the shadow.” Helen Keller

**

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round,for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church” Ferdinand Magellan

**

“And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows!” Mark Twain

**

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows,

the light and dark which that thing provides. Junichiro Tanizaki

**

Never fear shadows. They simply mean there’s a light shining somewhere nearby. Ruth E. Renkel

**

Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture,

the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree” William Faulkner

**

Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter’s day,how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! it is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life, Tom, are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these! Charles Dickens

**

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t. Blaise Pascal

**

The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.”
William Shakespeare

**

“One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it” Elizabeth Bowe

**

A wave of panic passed over the vessel, and these rough and hardy men, who feared no mortal foe, shook with terror at the shadows of their own minds. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

**

“Look at that sea, girls–all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn’t enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.” Lucy Maud Montgomery in Anne of Green Gables

**

. . . the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed. Charles Dickens

**

I’m always shy in front of an audience, so I’m always at the back, in the shadows, just doing it. I don’t like the front, the adulation. Bill Wyman

**

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.
Lorna Luft

**

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don’t pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.
Gwen John

**

“Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.”
T.S. Eliot

**

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides. Junichiro Tanizaki

**

Never fear shadows. They simply mean there’s a light shining somewhere nearby.
Ruth E. Renkel

**
Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.
Eleanor Roosevelt

**

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

Blaise Pascal

**

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations - always darker, emptier, simpler than these.
Friedrich Nietzsche

**
I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great specter of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.
Thomas Huxley

**

Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark. — Zen saying

**

He is one of those people to whom you must allow moods,–when their sun shines, dance,–and when their vapors rise, sit in the the shadow. Harriet Prescott Spofford

**

To think of shadows is a serious thing.

Victor Hugo

**

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Charles Dickens

**

Turn your face to the sun, and the shadows fall behind you. Maori Proverb

**

The light is most golden just before the shadows fall

**

What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot, Blackfoot Tribal Chief

“A false friend and a shadow attend only while the sun shines.”
Benjamin Franklin

“what are we doing? We are two friends, in the dark, telling a story to keep the Shadows away.”

Robert Schenkkan, “BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON”

“Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.”

Herman Melville
from Moby-Dick

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