“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”

— Margaret Atwood, book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Do you have more details about the quote "Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecogni…" by Margaret Atwood?

Margaret Atwood348

Canadian writer 1939

Marian Renta

Music lyrics, Great Deep (2021) —"May"

“How slow the Shadow creeps: but when 'tis past,
How fast the Shadows fall. How fast! How fast!”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"On the Same" (On a Sundial II)
Sonnets and Verse (1938)

“From wine what sudden friendship springs!”

John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright

VI, "The Squire and His Cur"
Fables (1727), Fables, Part the Second (1738)

“When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn’t that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows. But it also devours.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

“A shadow may be infinitely dark, and also of infinite degrees of absence of darkness. The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), III Six books on Light and Shade

“In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of uncertainty”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss
Context: In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!... " These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west wind roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint humming, yet nevertheless, merged in the clamor of the storm, it reaches the ear.