Tree And Shadow Quotes & Sayings

It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with gray-turning, gold-turning light. The Shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool, lovely day. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Desire For Thee"
My desire to love thee
is just like a tree,
must have one root
but several branches of fruit
I want to make you feel
as if you are horizon i steal
you are as free as wind
where my love flows in swing
i see thee in glaze shadow around
a graceful presence on passion ground
that is "THEE" you spark everywhere
Everywhere am far and near. — Seema Gupta

Big? Sure. But, he can't catch mice! So for your big tree. No use? Then plant it in the wasteland - in emptiness. Walk idly around it and rest under it's shadow. No axe or saw prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down. Useless? You should worry!. — Zhuangzi

She looked at her roses. They were white, some incurved and holy, others expanded in an ecstacy. The tree was dark as a shadow. She lifted her hand impulsively to the flowers; she went forward and touched them in worship. — D.H. Lawrence

To see a shadow and think it is a tree that is a pity; but to see a tree and to think it a shadow can be fatal. — Phyllis Bottome

Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slow circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf, as if he were seeing it for the first time. Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus. — Neil Gaiman

For again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now, a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years, but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall. — Charles Dickens

It's not easy is it? Being a great man's son. You'd thought that would come with all kinds of advantages - with borrowed admiration, and respect. But it's only as easy as it is for the seeds of a great tree, trying to grow in its choking shadow. Not many make it to the sunlight for themselves. — Joe Abercrombie

Where tree leaves dance... one shall find flames... the fire's shadow will illuminate the village... and once again tree leaves shall bud anew. — Masashi Kishimoto

I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow. — Wallace Stevens

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

There was a man that hated his footprints and his shadow, so one day he thought that if he ran fast enough, his footprints and shadow would not be able to follow him and then he never ever had to look at them again. He ran and he ran as fast as he could, but the shadow and the footprints had no problems keeping up to him. And he ran even faster and all of a sudden he fell dead to the ground. But if he been standing still there hadn't been any footprints and if he had been resting under a tree his shadow had been swallowed of the trees shadow. — Benjamin Hoff

Love is a naked shadow, On a gnarled and naked tree. — Langston Hughes

Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing. — Abraham Lincoln

Rochester: "I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard ... And what right would that ruin have to bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?"
Jane: "You are no ruin sir - no lighting-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop. — Charlotte Bronte

A piece of bread,
some fresh water,
the shadow of a tree and your eyes, my beloved.
No sultan is happier than me,
no beggar more sad. — Omar Khayyam

But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter 'I.' One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter 'I. — Virginia Woolf

A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down. — Rudyard Kipling

If you have not touched the rocky wall of a canyon. If you have not heard a rushing river pound over cobblestones. If you have not seen a native trout rise in a crystalline pool beneath a shattering riffle, or a golden eagle spread its wings and cover you in shadow. If you have not seen the tree line recede to the top of a bare crested mountain. If you have not looked into a pair of wild eyes and seen your own reflection. Please, for the good of your soul, travel west. — Daniel J. Rice

A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: "This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree." If it were to go, all would go
this city, this mischevious and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death. — E.B. White

No innocence can shield a man from the calumnies of the wicked. [ ... ] As a shadow follows its substance, so envy pursues goodness. It is only at the tree laden with fruit that men throw stones. If we would live without being slandered we must wait until we get to heaven. Let us be very heedful not to believe the flying rumors which are always harassing gracious men. If there are no believers in lies, there will be but a dull market in falsehood, and good men's characters will be safe. Ill will never spoke well. Sinners have an ill will to saints; therefore, be sure that they will not speak well of them. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow. — Kahlil Gibran

You're not honey. Your'e wine. You're the deepest, darkest shadow under a tree on a blazing day. You're strong and hard, coursing like a current at the bottom of a river. — Cate Tiernan

The rain redoubled, and a sudden flash of lightning burned the world into existence all around them: every gray rock in the drystone wall, every blade of grass, every puddle and every tree was perfectly illuminated, and then swallowed by a deeper darkness, leaving after-images on Shadow's night-blinded eyes. — Neil Gaiman

The name Aziza is of Arabic origin and means precious. I call her Sitti, the Arabic village word for my grandmother. Although Sitti stands true to her name, someone is always telling her she isn't precious. As she grows into womanhood, Sitti hides from her thoughts, her voice, and her own shadow. She doesn't want to draw attention to herself, not even from the rays of sun that bless the entire land. But no one looks at an olive tree and asks it why it hides its fruit. It blossoms when it's ready and under the right conditions. As Sitti grows up, it did not occur to her that this could be the case for herself. — Sadiqua Hamdan

Our own ambitions and tasks that we set for ourselves, the framework we attempt to impose upon the world, is no more than a shadow of a tree cast across the snow. It will change as the sun moves, be swallowed in the night, sway with the wind, and when the smooth snow vanishes, it will lie distorted upon the uneven earth. But the tree continues to be. Do you understand that? — Robin Hobb

How do you see those tree? ... They are yellow. Well then put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion. — Paul Gauguin

Trouble follows you like a shadow, Gillian. You're prone to injuries. I swear to God, if a tree decided to fall right now, it would find your head to land on."
"Oh, for heaven's sake," she muttered. "I'll admit that I have had a run of bad fortune, but - "
He wouldn't let her continue. "A run of bad fortune? Since I've known you, you've been beaten, stabbed and now shot with an arrow. If this keeps up, you'll be dead in another month — Julie Garwood

[Once Ummon asked a lesser light Are you a gardener> Yes it replied Why have turnips no roots> Ummon asked the gardener who could not reply Because said Ummon rainwater is plentiful] I think about this for a moment. Ummon's koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon's way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to. — Dan Simmons

I wake up in the morning asking myself what can I do today, how can I help the world today. I believe in what I do beyond a shadow of a doubt. I gave my word to this tree and to all the people that my feet would not touch the ground until I had done everything in my power to make the world aware of this problem and to stop the destruction. — Julia Hill

So many things in this world were cracked and sad, and still a glowing showed through and moments came when everything was lit and love happened. Every tree stood where it belonged, each bird had perfect feathers folded against its tiny body, each holding a heart beating madly. Life was a vibration of light and dark, and love illuminated that life. Then darkness descended and your heart was ripped apart. So that was part of it, a requirement of the miracle. Death stayed, lurking in the shadow of beauty. In the bargain, life both had meaning and had none. So, she kept thinking, what to do? What to do? A pressure in her would not stop asking. There were not many things she could make better, not many things she could change. And yet ... and yet ... sparks of possibility still shot out. Unasked for, they came and randomly flew up. — Susan Minot

Remember to take in and harvest light yet also allow yourself to cast shadows where needed, like a tree. Then, in return, your shadow will support your light. — Iva Kenaz

Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn't a real woodsman. — Neil Gaiman

The religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky than our elders; but the tree was sound at its heart ... — Lucy Larcom

I like old people, just as I like old trees: in their shadow there is freshness and peace, one admires them, and around them everything is so calm. — Svetlana Alliluyeva

I say, did you hear me?" The old man shook a worn walking stick at the oak. "I said move it and I meant it! I was sitting on that rock" -he pointed to a boulder- "enjoying the rising sun on my old bones when you had the nerve to cast a shadow over it and chill me! Move this instant. I say!" The tree did not respond. It also did not move. "I won't take any more of your insolence!" The old man began to beat on the tree with his stick. "Move or I'll - I'll -" "Someone shut that looney in a cage!" Fewmaster Toede shouted, galloping back from the front of the caravan. "Get your hands off me!" the old man shreiked at the draconians who ran up and accosted him. He beat on them feebly with his staff until they took it away from him. "Arrest the tree!" he insisted. "Obstructing sunlight! That's the charge! — Margaret Weis

Bound for your distant home"

Bound for your distant home
you were leaving alien lands.
In an hour as sad as I've known
I wept over your hands.
My hands were numb and cold,
still trying to restrain
you, whom my hurt told
never to end this pain.

But you snatched your lips away
from our bitterest kiss.
You invoked another place
than the dismal exile of this.
You said, 'When we meet again,
in the shadow of olive-trees,
we shall kiss, in a love without pain,
under cloudless infinities.'

But there, alas, where the sky
shines with blue radiance,
where olive-tree shadows lie
on the waters glittering dance,
your beauty, your suffering,
are lost in eternity.
But the sweet kiss of our meeting ......
I wait for it: you owe it me ....... — Alexander Pushkin

Summer is the season of motion, winter is the season of form. In summer everything moves save the fixed and inert. Down the hill flows the west wind, making wavelets in the shorter grass and great billows in the standing hay; the tree in full leaf sways its heavy boughs below and tosses its leaves above; the weed by the gate bends and turns when the wind blows down the road. It is the shadow of moving things that we usually see, and the shadows are themselves in motion. The shadow of a branch, speckled through with light, wavers across the lawn, the sprawling shadow of the weed moves and sways across the dust. — Henry Beston

Dear Girl,
You got into my drought life as a fortune seed, you shed your tears to grow up the seed, when the seed was toddling, u poured your love to protect from the threats, now it's grown up well as a tree and ready to be a shadow for the creator who cares it love it protect it so called my sweet lovely Girl. — Sam Nelson

Now that they were in the light, they were transparent
fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.
then some re-adjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they always had been; as all the men I had known had been perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men are ghosts by comparison. — C.S. Lewis

This is the Day in which God's most excellent favors have been poured out upon men, the Day in which His most mighty grace hath been infused into all created things. It is incumbent upon all the peoples of the world to reconcile their differences, and, with perfect unity and peace, abide beneath the shadow of the Tree of His care and loving-kindness. — Baha'u'llah

Bless ... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows. — Emily Carr

And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. "I must break in on all this," she thought as she looked around the room. — Elizabeth Bowen

On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice. — Albert Camus

Open the door of nature; enter inside; forget yourself; think nothing; be the nature itself and now you are a heron, a river, a rosehip, you are the shadow of a fox, sweet fruit of a tree, you are the silence of a lake! When you forget yourself, when you stop thinking, you become everything, you become the universe itself! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

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

Upon the purple tree-tops far away, and on the green height near at hand up which the shades were slowly creeping, there was an equal hush. Between the real landscape and its shadow in the water, there was no division; both were so untroubled and clear, and, while so fraught with solemn mystery of life and death, so hopefully reassuring to the gazer's soothed heart, because so tenderly and mercifully beautiful. — Charles Dickens

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

A painting is merely the image of a tree, a man, or any other object reflected in a fountain. The difference between a painting and sculpture is the difference between a shadow and the thing which casts it. — Benvenuto Cellini

Jace watched as the moon rose over the pines and scattered the mountainside with fool's gold. He rested against a large tree trunk as he leaned back into the dark shadow of the boughs and kicked himself mentally for thinking this was going to be easy. He should have known finding someone as complicated as Bo Hamilton wouldn't be easy. — B. J. Daniels

Raised herself on one round elbow and looked out on a tiny river like a gleaming blue snake winding itself around a purple hill. Right below the house was a field white as snow with daisies, and the shadow of the huge maple tree that bent over the little house fell lacily across it. Far beyond it were the white crests of Four Winds Harbour and a long range of sun-washed dunes and red cliffs. — L.M. Montgomery

Lincoln described character is a tree and reputation as its shadow. The tree will always be what it is but the shadow we see depends on where we stand and the angle of the light. — Michael Josephson

Substance is like tree and smartness its shadow. The smartness is what we think it is and the substance is the real thing! — Utpal Vaishnav

Many critics are like woodpeckers, who, instead of enjoying the fruit and shadow of a tree, hop incessantly around the trunk, pecking holes in the bark to discover some little worm or other. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Dad called this the shadow time. The sun sucks colour from the world, he'd said. He'd taught her to see the softer colours of the dusk, the green and orange bark, the purple shadows. At times like this Flinty felt her edges vanish, leaving her part of the mountains, like the wallaby pulling wonga vine down from a thorn bush, or the sleepy possum peering from a tree. — Jackie French

In the deep shadow of the tree there was a deeper shadow yet, black, inchoate, vague - a crouching form full of savage vigor and menace. It — Arthur Conan Doyle

The creature had nut-brown skin mixed with patches of ash. It was human-sized and formed, but its skin looked like the bark of an old, old tree. About the same height as Donna, it was spindly with arms and legs that were all joints and angles. Its face was narrow and pointed, with hair on top of its head like thick moss and narrow black eyes that glinted even in the dim light of the room. The thing's body was clothed in lichen and moss, with vines twining around its sharp limbs. The creature opened its lipless mouth, a dark slash across its twisted face.

Donna's mind flashed back to the party and the shadow she'd seen sliding through the darkness outside Xan's house. She hadn't been imagining things, after all.

The wood elves had returned to the city. — Karen Mahoney