“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
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Henry Beston 24
American writer 1888–1968Related quotes

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

“When the wind blows, the grass bends.”
Source: The Analects

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

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.

“We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.”
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.
Book VI, lines 149–152; Glaucus to Diomedes.
Translations, Iliad (1997)