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Shadow Quotes

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Shadow Quotes

“Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world.”

“Growing up in the shadow of Johnson Space Center and moving to Texas to welcome our last moon mission home, I wanted to be an astronaut. Combined with my love for Navy history and World War II flight ops, and unsatisfying degrees in college and law school, I joined the Navy and became a naval aviator.”

“A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must needs think and think.”

“You only have to gaze around you at the natural world to see the proof that beauty, form, order, and growth have survived for billions of years. In dealing with your shadow, you are aligning yourself with the same infinite power. The shadow isn't a fearsome opponent but a worthy one. Powerful as it is, the power of wholeness is infinitely greater, and by a miracle of creation, it is within your grasp.”

“Finally, a prominent nation is taking on the homosexual agenda and rejecting it outright. A number of African nations have done the same, but third-world countries are not newsworthy to mainstream media. The irony is stunning that a Communist nation would understand that preserving the value of men and women marrying and producing children makes for demographic survival, while many American Christian leaders cower in the shadows, in fear of activist homosexuals and their leftist supporters. I say 'cheers' to the Russians on this one. That nation will probably outlive America.”

“Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.”

“Our first duty to liberty is to keep our own. But it is also our duty - as Europeans - to keep alive in the Eastern as well as the Western half of our continent those ideas of human dignity which Europe gave to the world. Let us therefore resolve to keep the lamps of freedom burning bright so that all who look to the West from the shadows of the East need not doubt that we remain true to those human and spiritual values that lie at the heart of European civilization.”

“As a relentless gatherer of moments, I find that my favorite images, although grounded in the present, are like spirits shaped by memories. They whisper of fairy tales, poetry, and other lives, as each gesture connects with another and raises yet another from the dead. Shadows flicker on film to an inner melody as I navigate, camera at hand and at the speed of light, through unimaginable worlds - desperately trying to make sense of the joy and suffering before it all disappears.”

“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.”

“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. ... the universal gravity of bodies, ... is merely the reverse or shadow of that which really moves nature. Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.”

“My fictional worlds were those of a fabulist, of an intellectual fantasist. I was the lawgiver, and the countries and inhabitants of my imagination were answerable to me. If I wished for a man to levitate; to enter another's story by rowboat or by intoning a sentence or by performing a shadow-puppet play; if I wanted him to become a swarm of intelligent elementary particles and enter the Internet and travel into the past and far into the future, it was so.”

“We all make choices. Believe me, I would like to write the hit of the world. It's not like I have any desire to be in the shadows. My vision isn't marketing. Some people want to sell 6 million albums. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not what I do. I'd rather look at a piece of work and say it's great rather than it's successful.”

“As matters now stand, the veto seems inappropriate, given the absence of any deep ideological split between major states, and definitely constrains the war-prevention mission of the UN. Similarly, the present permanent five are out of touch with geopolitical realities, and constitute a remnant of a West-centric world order, casting a shadow of illegitimacy across the activities of the most important organ of global policymaking in the UN System.”

“If it is bin Laden, he's a very intelligent guy. He's been planning his war for a long time. I remember the last time I met him in 1997 in Afghanistan. And bin Laden said to me "From this mountain, Mr. Robert, upon which you are sitting, we beat the Russian army and helped break the Soviet Union. And I pray to God that he allows us to turn America into a shadow of itself." When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.”

“The world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind some poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I'm always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.”

“One of the things that troubles me the most in life, that upsets all of us, is that we reach this world with the capability to be anything. But then life starts to confine us inside our small realities. And then, the shadow of those other possible lives stays to lurk us and you can't shake it off, since it was so easy, it'd have been so easy to lead another life. We make twenty thousand small choices a day, and maybe one of those choices is the one that will take us to a completely different life. If you stop to think about it, it is vertiginous, hypnotizing and distressing.”

“The image is a great reminder how we create our world through interpretations made up of language and symbols. Our language and symbols are always incomplete versions of a greater reality. Here is why inquiry is such a powerful tool when compared to simple advocacy. Inquiry allows us to discover what might be outside the cave instead of arguing about the shadows on the wall.”

“I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”

“But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,-- Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun.”

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.”

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing - the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”

“I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.”

“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?" A great Shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.”

“We Christian writers must paint evil with the blackest of brushes, not to sow fear, but to call out the monsters to be scattered by our light. If Satan cloaks himself as an angel of white, intent on deceiving the world, any attempt on our parts to minimize evil is only complicit with his strategy... Turn to the light; don’t fear the shadows it creates.”

“Images cluttered the pages, but one tattoo set her nerves on edge; inky black eyes surrounded by wings likes shadows coalescing. Mine. The thought, the need, the reaction was overpowering. Leslie looked up. "This one." she said. "I need this one. But the image is more than just tempting art, and it draws her into a world of shadows and desire- into the world of Faerie.”

“Simple,' Tummeler replied.' Blueberries is one of the great forces o'good in the world.' How do you figure that?' said Charles. Well,' said Tummeler, 'have you ever seen a troll, or a Wendigo, or,' he shuddered, 'a Shadow-Born ever eating a blueberry pie?' No,' Charles admitted. There y'go,' said Tummeler. It's cause they can't stand the goodness in it.' Can't argue with you there,' said Charles. Foods is good and evil, just like people, or badgers, or even scowlers.' Evil food?' said Charles. Parsnips,' said Tummeler, 'Them's as evil as they come.”