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
Posthumous attributions
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.
“A tree cannot grow in its parents’ shadows.”
Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 7 (p. 82)
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Octavia E. Butler 107
American science fiction writer 1947–2006Related quotes
From the seventh book, "The Book of Youth"
The Pillow Book
“The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.”
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
“Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.”
"Song for a Dark Girl" (l. 11-12), from Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
Broadcast from London (6 March 1934); published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 21.
1934
“Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.”