Shadow Child Quotes & Sayings

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me ... I see pictures merging before my mind's eye - paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction - and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home ... — W.G. Sebald

I think evil is our collective shadow. Each one of us has a tendency for the diabolical. If I put you in inhumane conditions, if you're not educated, if you're extremely poor, if you're humiliated, then as a child if you suffer abuse, then you will manifest even when you grow up. — Deepak Chopra

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child's board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted. — Walter Scott

Slowly the highlights emerged: sunlight on the Madonna's face, on the curls, left cheek and shoulder of the child. On the foredrapery covering the Madonna's leg, on the back of John as he straddled the balustrade, on the inside of the balustrade itself to accent its importance in the structure. All the rest, the blockseat, stairs, walls were in quiet
shadow. Now, he thought, one saw and felt the crisis, the intense emotional thinking reflected on Mary's face as she felt the tug of Jesus at her breast and the weight of the cross in her hand. — Irving Stone

Wideacre faces due south and the sun shines all day on the yellow stone until it is warm and powdery to the touch. The sun travels from gable end to gable end so the front of the house is never in shadow. When I was a small child collecting petals in the rose garden, or loitering at the back of the house in the stable yard, it seemed that Wideacre was the very centre of the world with the sun defining our boundaries in the east at dawn, until it sank over our hills in the west, in the red and pink evening. — Philippa Gregory

Crazy Horse was a new kind of leader to emerge after the Civil War, at the beginning of the army's wars of annihilation in the northern plains and the Southwest. Born in 1842 in the shadow of the sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills), he was considered special, a quiet and brooding child. Already the effects of colonialism were present among his people, particularly alcoholism and missionary influence. Crazy Horse became a part of the Akicita, a traditional Sioux society that kept order in villages and during migrations. It also had authority to make certain that the hereditary chiefs were doing their duty and dealt harshly with those who did not. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Christianity only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. The mother tells her falsehoods to her child, but, thank heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's shadow. Our mother's faith has not grown with her experience. Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of life was too hard for her to learn. — Henry David Thoreau

It's a trick question, Aquilla. A Mask is not made. She is remade. First she is destroyed. Stripped down to the trembling child that lives at her core. It doesn't matter how strong she thinks she is. Blackcliff diminishes, humiliates, and humbles her." "But if she survives, she is reborn. She rises from the shadow world of failure and despair so that she might become as fearful as that which destroyed her. So that she might know darkness and use it as her scim and shield in her mission to serve the Empire. — Sabaa Tahir

But if you wish, you can imagine that the Shadow does wait for your return and that it does remember everything that has gone before and that it doesn't let you accept yourself as perfect until you let it. There is truth in that. That is why a child usually cries as soon as it's born. With its first breath, the Shadow returns. — Christopher Pike

What is a shadow? It is the self without a face or a name, all outline and no feature, the self on the verge of being erased. It is the incidental child of matter and light. Look how it spreads itself on the ground, weary but weightless, unable to leave a trace. — Conchitina Cruz

Children perceive frightening ghosts and monsters and dragons and they are terrified. Yet if they ask someone they trust for the meaning of what they perceive, and are willing to let their own interpretations go in favor of reality, their fear goes with them. When a child is helped to translate his 'ghosts' into a courtain, his 'monster' into a shadow and his 'dragon' into a dream he is no longer afraid, and laughs happily at his own fear.
You, my child, are afraid of your brothers and of your Father and of yourself. But you are merely deceived in them. Ask what they are of the Teacher of reality, and hearing His answer, you too will laugh at your fears and replace them with peace. For fear lies not in reality, but in the minds of children who do not understand reality. It is only their lack of understanding that frightens them, and when they learn to perceive truly they are not afraid. — Foundation For Inner Peace

A few years ago, she thought someone had finally come to love her and accepted her unconditionally, but she was wrong. You couldn't really define love with money. It was more than that. — Diyar Harraz

The Poor Children

Take heed of this small child of earth;
He is great; he hath in him God most high.
Children before their fleshly birth
Are lights alive in the blue sky.

In our light bitter world of wrong
They come; God gives us them awhile.
His speech is in their stammering tongue,
And his forgiveness in their smile.

Their sweet light rests upon our eyes.
Alas! their right to joy is plain.
If they are hungry Paradise
Weeps, and, if cold, Heaven thrills with pain.

The want that saps their sinless flower
Speaks judgment on sin's ministers.
Man holds an angel in his power.
Ah! deep in Heaven what thunder stirs,

When God seeks out these tender things
Whom in the shadow where we sleep
He sends us clothed about with wings,
And finds them ragged babes that weep — Victor Hugo

The savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species — Johann Gottfried Herder

This is how talents weave from generation to generation, how the shadow stretches, and how an artist born nearly a hundred years earlier begins to fill the soul of a child who shares his name. — Mitch Albom

In the Queen's dream she ran hazily through an emerald mist. Behind her trailed caricatures of elves. Their bodies were shadows, long and twisted. Just one of their strides covered two of hers. They were like harlequins, and their smiles gleamed white as they fired arrows that left bare trails in the Nixus. She looked over her shoulder just as an arrow sliced at her face and severed locks of her scarlet hair. Her bones made an unpleasant jolt as the Queen hit what felt like a wall. A great shadow towered over her, its face a porcelain white mask. Unlike the elves, however, the figure did not smile. Claws plucked her from the fog as if she were a child's toy, and the shadow's mask flipped open, revealing a familiar face. — Plague Jack

Good horror is the kind that we can all relate to. We all know what it was like to be a child and hear something move in our room. Or how the teddy bear that was so cuddly and nice during the day turned into this horrible, foreboding shadow at night. Those are the kind of things that we all can relate to. — Harrison Smith

So with Easter. It was fun, as a child, to bound down the stairs to find seasonal sweet-treats under each plate, but again, with the passing of time, and the shadow of death over our broken family circle, I've seen Easter as highest necessity. If hope is to flourish, it had better be true. — Gerhard E Frost

the ultimate design of God was to give salvation to the world at large. If the Jews were to have the peculiar glory of giving birth to the Saviour, and of having the Gospel first ministered to them, they were not to engross all the benefits of his mission. The Gentiles, who sat in darkness and the shadow of death, were to behold his light, and to be guided by him into the paths of peace. Wherever there is a fallen child of Adam, there is a person for whom Christ came into the world, and to whom the Gospel, if thankfully accepted, shall become the power of God unto salvation. We are — Anonymous

No. Please do not name either child after me, Elayne. Let them live their own lives. My shadow will be long enough as it is.'
-Rand — Robert Jordan

What's going on with your face, by the way?"
Gansey rubbed his chin, rueful. His skin felt reluctantly stubbled. He knew he was being diverted, but he allowed it. "Is it growing?"
"Dude, you aren't really going to do that beard thing, are you? I thought you were joking. You know that stopped being cool in the fourteen century or whenever it was that Paul Bunyan lived." Ronan looked over his shoulder at him. He was sporting the five o'clock shadow that he was capable of growing at any time of the day. "Just stop. You look mangy."
"It's irrelevant. It's not growing. I'm doomed to be a man-child."
"If you keep saying things like 'man-child,' we're done," Ronan said. "Hey, man. Don't let it get you down. Once your balls drop, that beard'll come in great. — Maggie Stiefvater

But of course a man like Burke could not imagine what that was like. To live, day after day, as a shadow - to speak and be ignored, as though one's words made no sound. To protest and be patted on the head, as though one's concerns were a child's. Her uncle had not burned the embroidery in an outrage, Jane thought suddenly, but in the righteous grip of moral duty. His niece's role was to be used, not to think or speak or feel. And so, in the very act of communicating an opinion, she had committed the egregious offense of insisting on her humanity. — Meredith Duran

The valley of the shadow of death holds no darkness for the child of God. There must be light, else there could be no shadow. Jesus is the light. He has overcome death. — Dwight L. Moody

There is a sweet anguish springing up in our bosoms when a child's face brightens under the shadow of the waiting angel. There is an autumnal fitness when age gives up the ghost; and when the saint dies there is a tearful victory. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

As you get older, the child within you begins to suffocate in the shadow of the man you are destined to become. — Charles Lee

That man would betray his own shadow. And for what? A child's tale.'
'Is it?' Mag looked at her. 'Is it only a tale?'
For a moment, the purple eyes grew dark, black as the little rags of shadows that Mag saw on empty streets or patches of barren ground, attached to nothing, seemingly blown at random from some place adrift in light. — Patricia A. McKillip

If I want my world to be less vicious, then I must become more gentle. If I want my children to embrace other children for who they are, to treat other children with the dignity and respect every child of God deserves, then I had better treat other adults the same way. And I better make sure that my children know beyond a shadow of a doubt that in God's and their father's and my eyes, they are okay. They are loved as they are. Without a single unless. Because the kids who bully are those who are afraid that a secret part of themselves is not okay. — Glennon Doyle Melton

Virginia Woolf observes that "the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children.... To become a child is very literal; to find everything so strange that nothing is surprising; to be heartless, to be ruthless, yet to be so passionate that a snub or a shadow drapes the world in gloom. It is so to be Alice in Wonderland. — Carolyn Sigler

Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime. — Herbert Ward

Of course not. No one is chosen. Not ever. Not in the real world. You chose to climb out of your window and ride on a leopard. You chose to get a witch's Spoon back, and to make friends with a wyvern. You chose to trade your shadow for a child's life. You chose not to let the Marquess hurt your friend
you chose to smash her cages! You chose to face your own Death, not to balk at a great sea to cross and no ship to cross it in. And twice now you have chosen not to go home when you might have, if only you abandoned your friends. You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you
you chose yourself. You could have had a lovely holiday in Fairyland and never met the Marquess, never worried yourself with local politics, had a romp with a few brownies and gone home with enough memories for a lifetime's worth of novels. But you didn't. You chose. You chose it all. Just like you chose your path on the beach: to lose your heart is not a path for the faint and fainting. — Catherynne M Valente

"So, you're basically playing the part of Wendy."
Jeb pauses and glances at me. "Windy?"
"Wendy, from Peter Pan. You're stitching Dad's shadow into place." Peter Pan was his favorite fairy tale as a child. His mom read it to him every night.
There's the hint of a shy, boyish grin on his face - the one he used to give me when I'd catch him off guard. — A.G. Howard

Once, as I passed by a cottage, there came out a lovely fairy child, with two wondrous toys, one in each hand. The one was the tube through which the fairy-gifted poet looks when he beholds the same thing everywhere; the other that through which he looks when he combines into new forms of loveliness those images of beauty which his own choice has gathered from all regions wherein he has travelled. Round the child's head was an aureole of emanating rays. As I looked at him in wonder and delight, round crept from behind me the something dark, and the child stood in my shadow. Straightway he was a commonplace boy, with a rough broad-brimmed straw hat, through which brim the sun shone from behind. The toys he carried were a multiplying-glass and a kaleidoscope. I sighed and departed. — George MacDonald

Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism. — Winston S. Churchill

The Presence, indeed, was with him, and he felt it, but he knew it only as the wind and shadow, the sky and closed daisies: in all these things and the rest it took shape that it might come near him. Yea, the Presence was in his very soul, else he could never have rejoiced in friend, or desired ghost to mother him: still he knew not the Presence. But it was drawing nearer and nearer to his knowledge -- even in sun and air and night and cloud, in beast and flower and herd-boy, until at last it would reveal itself to him, in him, as Life Himself. Then the man would know that in which the child had rejoiced. — George MacDonald

the Father uses the valley of shadow to teach you about His sufficiency and goodness. Don't despair, child, while you're walking through it. — Angela Elwell Hunt

The scar she'd left her was so deep that it may take a thousand million years to heal. She couldn't pretend like nothing had happened. She couldn't shut her feelings, like how you shut a window blind; once you did it, all lights from the outside would be swept away from the room. It had taken her years to acknowledge the fact that she was unwanted; a subject of shame for her mother to sink in. And for sure, it would take her more than nine years to forget it all, in one go. — Diyar Harraz

Keep behind me, Metatron - wait here - Asriel is suspicious - let me lull him first. When he's off guard, I'll call you. But come as a shadow, in this small form, so he doesn't see you - otherwise, he'll just let the child's daemon fly away. The Regent was a being whose profound intellect had had thousands of years to deepen and strengthen itself, and whose knowledge extended over a million universes. Nevertheless, at that moment he was blinded by his twin obsessions: to destroy Lyra and to possess her mother. He nodded and stayed where he was, while the woman and the monkey moved forward as quietly as they could. — Philip Pullman

It is evil," the Old Wise One said. "For very long we have walked carefree in the only paradise. It would be better if all here were to die." The last Shadow child said firmly, "Nothing is worse than that I should die," and something that had wrapped the world was gone. — Gene Wolfe

Six centuries ago, the pre-Colombian natives who settled here named this region with a word that in their language translates to, 'The Mouth of the Shadow.' Later, the Iroquois who showed up and inexplicably slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those first tribes renamed it a word that literally translates to, 'Seriously, Fuck this Place. — David Wong

The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let's call it a---a germ. And let's say conditions prove right for that germ to develop---to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy and malice and frustration... — Sarah Waters

I always prayed the same way at night: "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Please bless my mother, father, sister, everyone in the word, and me. And please make my father quit drinking."
As a child growing up in a family battling alcoholism, this is what I know: Something bad is coming; it always does. I can't ask for help; I'm too ashamed. I can't talk about our secrets; no one understands. I can't trust anyone; they always leave.
Questions bounced off my self-constructed wall of values
a barricade I'd made from the fears I'd pushed into my darkness.
How could Ryan, a professional baseball player, really resist all those women? How could I really trust Jerry, my childhood friend? I'd barely awakened to sex and already boys were the seventh wonder of the world. Did anyone really trust another person? I needed proof. That proof hadn't revealed itself ... yet. — Pamela Taeuffer

Why does it always seem that I have only the shadow of my father? I'm like a child constantly grabbing at his coattails and missing. — Libba Bray

Perhaps it's natural for a father, for every parent, to see in his child all that's unspoiled and good. — Vaddey Ratner

Even on especially hard days, I began to notice him everywhere, setting a table before me in the presence of my enemies, pursuing me with his love. Both the child and the cynic walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The cynic focuses on the darkness; the child focuses on the Shepherd. — Paul Miller

If shadows were caused by the interplay between light and Life, a child's was still forming. An adult's was inextricably bound to his body, but a child had a tenuous relationship to his own permanence, and thus, his own shadow. — Anne Ursu

A mother can see into her child's heart merely by looking at his shadow. — Jang Jin-sung

The rhythm of the "Blue Danube" waltz rippled and rang and sang in his head, the lights of a thousand chandeliers glinted and prismed, and for a heartbeat Shadow was a child again, and all it took to make him happy was to ride the carousel: he stayed perfectly still, riding his eagle-tiger at the center of everything, and the world revolved around him. — Neil Gaiman

I'll be so quiet for you.
Look like a child for you.
Be like a shadow of a shadow
Of a shadow for you. — Mike Hadreas

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. — John Fowles

Shadow is Light's child. It is nothing without the Light, and nothing if it falls into Darkness. — Anne Hamilton

The duty of the inn-keeper,is to sell to the first comer, stews, repose, light, fire, dirty
sheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to stop passers-by, to empty small
purses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones; to shelter travelling families
respectfully: to shave the man, to pluck the woman, to pick the child
clean; to quote the window open, the window shut, the chimney-corner,the arm-chair, the chair, the ottoman, the stool, the feather-bed, the mattress
and the truss of straw; to know how much the shadow uses up the
mirror, and to put a price on it; and, by five hundred thousand devils, to
make the traveller pay for everything, even for the flies which his dog
eats! — Victor Hugo

There's this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.
In death Rose became Linden's parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs. — Lauren DeStefano

Mother I had a beautiful house in Shingdi a vegetable garden Vines of bitter gourd lettuce English spinach and tousled coconut trees Coconuts fell on my darling husbands head One day we made love under the tree Now I was pregnant just like my orchard full of fruits with the love child Oh I ran as hard as I could from the shadow These were shadows of time shadows of the past ... — Mehreen Ahmed

I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow. — Madeleine L'Engle

There are opportunities committed to every mother. The humble round of duties that women regard as boring and tiresome should be looked upon as a grand and noble work. Through sunshine and shadow, the mother may make straight paths for the feet of her children, toward the glorious heights above. But it is only when she seeks to follow Christ in her own life that the mother can hope to form the character of her children after God's pattern. Every mother should go often to her Savior with the prayer, "Teach us, how shall we train the child, and what shall we do to him?" She will be given wisdom. — Ellen G. White

The war is against children, and all the other wars are just a shadow of the war on children. — Stefan Molyneux

Divine justice pursued its course; disasters came thick on me: I was forced to pass through the valley of the shadow of death. His chastisements are mighty; and one smote me which has humbled me for ever. You know I was proud of my strength: but what is it now, when I must give it over to foreign guidance, as a child does its weakness? Of late, Jane - only - only of late - I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker. I began to pray: very brief prayers they were, but very sincere. — Charlotte Bronte

He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy. — Virginia Woolf

If I have ever met someone without a single shadow on their heart, it was surely a child too young for speaking. — Patrick Rothfuss

brain as a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is 'Amy Foster's boy.' She calls him Johnny - which means Little John. "It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy's cot in a — Joseph Conrad

A child knows when they are on the receiving end of a didactic exercise, or when they are sitting in the shadow of something else. — Tim Crouch

Mariam kept her eyes to the ground, on her shadow, on her executioner's shadow trailing her.
Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. She wished she could she Leila again, wished to hear the clangour of her laugh, ...

Mariam wished for so much in those final moments.
Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who has loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last.
This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings."
--A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing — Edith Wharton

Does he think to scare me? Arya kissed him where his nose should be and plucked the grave worm from his eye to eat it, but it melted like a shadow in her hand.
The yellow skull was melting too, and the kindliest old man that she had ever seen was smiling down on her. "No one has ever tried to eat my worm before," he said. "Are you hungry, child?"
Yes, she thought, but not for food. — George R R Martin

But struggling with these better feelings was pride,
the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,
even this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone conneced her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so many, many traces when a very child. — Charles Dickens

Your desire for vengeance will cause countless deaths, child," she said, pointing a crooked finger at Rhylie. "Innocents will be caught up in your maelstrom, their lives torn apart. People you have never met, and will never know will die beneath your shadow if you do not stop. You tear the galaxy asunder with each step you take towards Vorcia. — Charles Hash

A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man - even a black child - was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged. Millions of blacks lived in that shadow - as forced laborers or their family members, or African Americans in terror of the system's caprice. The practice would not fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the first time since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior to the Civil War. — Douglas A. Blackmon