“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.”

Source: The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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American writer 1888–1968

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

“Autumn to winter, winter into spring,
Spring into summer, summer into fall, —
So rolls the changing year, and so we change;
Motion so swift, we know not that we move.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

"Immutable"

“Across the silent stream
Where the dream-shadows go,
From the dim blue Hill of Dream
I have heard the west wind blow.”

William Sharp (writer) (1855–1905) Scottish writer

From the Hills of Dream, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“When the wind blows, the grass bends.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Analects

“Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Let thine shadows upon the sundials fall,
and unleash the winds upon the open fields.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book The Book of Images

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.
Herbsttag (Autumn Day) (as translated by Cliff Crego)
Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images) (1902)

“All the vampires walkin' through the valley
Move west down Ventura Boulevard.
And all the bad boys are standing in the shadows
All the good girls are home with broken hearts.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Free Fallin, written with Jeff Lynne
Lyrics, Full Moon Fever (1989)

“I ask at what part of its curved motion the moving cause will leave the thing moved and moveable.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XXI Letters. Personal Records. Dated Notes.

“Perhaps a man's character was like a tree, and his reputation like its shadow; the shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

As quoted in "Lincoln's Imagination" by Noah Brooks, in Scribner's Monthly (August 1879), p. 586 http://books.google.com/books?id=jOoGAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA586 <br class="br">Posthumous attributions <br class="br">Variant: Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

“We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)
Context: Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

“Human generations are like leaves in their seasons.
The wind blows them to the ground, but the tree
Sprouts new ones when spring comes again.
Men too. Their generations come and go.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Book VI, lines 149–152; Glaucus to Diomedes.
Translations, Iliad (1997)

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