
“Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows.”
Variant: Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows. It's what the sunflowers do.
Untitled # 11
Lyrics, Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994)
“Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows.”
Variant: Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows. It's what the sunflowers do.
Source: The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), Ch. 1
Context: What you lack is the right connections, and that is what I've brought you here to make: connections. A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.
“The fountain of youth resides in our memory. You will never outlive your shadow.”
as quoted in Barry GEM "Barry GEM" http://www.barry-today.co.uk/article.cfm?id=102602&headline=Book%20on%20the%20trail%20of%20%20the%20Welsh%20Americans§ionIs=news&searchyear=2016 "Book on the trail of the Welsh Americans” (20 January 2016).
Bloomberg: "The Co-Inventor of BlackBerry Is Building Canada’s Quantum Brain Trust" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-09/the-co-inventor-of-blackberry-is-building-canada-s-quantum-brain-trust (09 February 2018)
As quoted in "Doom and glory of knowing who you are" by Jane Howard, in LIFE magazine, Vol. 54, No. 21 (24 May 1963), p. 89 https://books.google.com/books?id=mEkEAAAAMBAJ; a part of this statement has often been quoted as it was paraphrased in The New York Times (1 June 1964):
Context: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.