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“as the shadows assume
shapes
I fight the slow
retreat

now
my once-promise
dwindling
dwindling

now
lighting new cigarettes
pouring more
drinks

it has been a beautiful
fight

still
is.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don't want to see. If we refuse to face our shadow, it will project itself on someone else so we have no choice but to engage.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions â€� the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. Notice, however, that in all such cases the persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury. At other times, the witch hunt appears in less terrifying proportions—the cold war fear of a "Commie under every bed," for instance. And often, it appears in comic form—the interminable gossip about everybody else that tells you much more about the gossiper than about the object of gossip. But all of these are instances of individuals desperate to prove that their own shadows belong to other people.

Many men and women will launch into tirades about how disgusting homosexuals are. Despite how decent and rational they otherwise try to behave, they find themselves seized with a loathing of any homosexual, and in an emotional outrage will advocate such things as suspending gay civil rights (or worse). But why does such an individual hate homosexuals so passionately? Oddly, he doesn’t hate the homosexual because he is homosexual; he hates him because he sees in the homosexual what he secretly fears he himself might become. He is most uncomfortable with his own natural, unavoidable, but minor homosexual tendencies, and so projects them. He thus comes to hate the homosexual inclinations in other people—but only because he first hates them in himself.

And so, in one form or another, the witch hunt goes. We hate people "because," we say, they are dirty, stupid, perverted, immoral.... They might be exactly what we say they are. Or they might not. That is totally irrelevent, however, because we hate them only if we ourselves unknowingly possess the despised traits ascribed to them. We hate them because they are a constant reminder of aspects of ourselves that we are loathe to admit.
We are starting to see an important indicator of projection. Those items in the environment (people or things) that strongly affect us instead of just informing us are usually our own projections. Items that bother us, upset us, repulse us, or at the other extreme, attract us, compel us, obsess us—these are usually reflections of the shadow. As an old proverb has it,

I looked, and looked, and this I came to see:
That what I thought was you and you,
Was really me and me.”
― Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth

“Light and Dark: each was unaware that the other existed.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“Sometimes I feel as if I'm racing with my own shadow”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“To speak with the shadow, you must know the language of the darkness!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“In the calm, deep waters of the mind, the wolf waits.”
― F.T. McKinstry, Water Dark

“That if a thing is defined in contrast that's what life is, the shadow of death. So the mystery of death couldn't be the bad thing, because without it there wouldn't be life. The badness was life, just happening, as essential a part of the good as the good. And what was there to do but to take it as it comes and to hope, to hope constantly and carnally and with no time to lose.”
― Brian McGreevy, Hemlock Grove

“At one moment, his eyes sparkled in the light and in the next they were enshrouded in shadow. What connected those bands of light and dark? Could they indeed have been distinct entities?”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“My shadow is tired walking with me; but I have yet to be bored walking with myself, all by myself...”
― Munia Khan

“Listen, she said, "cherubim have come to my planet before."
"I know that. Where do you think I got my information?"
"What do you know about us?"
"I have heard that your host planet is shadowed, that it is troubled."
"It is beautiful," Meg said defensively.
She felt a rippling of his wings. "In the middle of your cities?"
"Well-no-but I don't live in a city."
"And is your planet peaceful?"
"Well-no-it isn't very peaceful."
"I had the idea," Proginoskes moved reluctantly within her mind, "that there are wars on your planet. People fighting and killing each other."
"Yes, that's so, but-"
"And children go hungry."
"Yes."
"And people don't understand each other."
"Not always."
"And there's-there's hate?"
"Yes."
She felt Proginoskes pulling away. "All I want to do," he was murmuring to himself, "is go some place quiet and recite the names of the stars...”
― Madeline L'Engle

“I found you in the whispers of the shadow... luring me out into the light. Swallowed by the song and richness of the breath dancing in depth and perception wide. Heart within your eyes, soul in your word, I found home upon the essence of you.”
― Jennifer Hillman

“Each of us has an equal amount of Shadow and Light buried in our souls. What makes us different is how much Shadow we choose to suppress, and how much Light we choose to show.”
― Taylor Chackowsky

“I hid my wound under my clothes. Nobody could see it, including myself, and I completely forgot about it. Then I met someone who, filled with love, held me tight in that point. The pain was devastating, and I hated him, o how much I hated him, the cause of all my suffering. Then I met someone, beautifully dressed, and I loved him so much, holding him tight with all my passion. And he suffered badly, and he hated me, o how much he hated me, the cause of all his pain. So the story went on till I met someone who undressed himself, standing completely naked, with all his horrible wounds. Hence I also undressed, and I saw my horrible wounds, which he could also see. Then...”
― Franco Santoro

“When you understand who God is, you can see beyond a shadow of a doubt why your weakness is nothing to be feared, because it just leaves more room for him and his strength.”
― Hayley and Michael DiMarco

“In Pliny I read about the invention of clay modeling. A Sicyonian potter came to Corinth. There his daughter fell in love with a young man who had to make frequent long journeys away from the city. When he sat with her at home, she used to trace the outline of his shadow that a candle’s light cast on the wall. Then, in his absence she worked over the profile, deepening, so that she might enjoy his face, and remember. One day the father slapped some potter’s clay over the gouged plaster; when the clay hardened he removed it, baked it, and "showed it abroad" (63).”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“To bite off your shadow is neither easy nor painless. It demands a single-mindedness that is almost unknown in this day.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

“Midnight"

The hours glide
Like drops of water on a window pane

Midnight silence

Fear unrolls in the air
And the wind
hides at the bottom of the well

OH

It's a leaf
We think the earth is going to end
Time

stirs in the shadow

Everyone is asleep

A SIGH

Inside the house someone has just died”
― Vicente Huidobro, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology

“Stop. J'en suis sorti. Des souvenirs. Du passé. Mais tôt ou tard les choses que tu as laissé derrière toi te rattrapent. Et les choses les plus simples, quand tu es amoureux, te semblent les plus belles. Parce que leur simplicité n'a pas d'égal. Et j'ai envie de crier. Dans ce silence qui fait mal. Stop. Laisse tomber. Reprends-toi. Voilà. Fermé. A double tour. Au fond du cÅ“ur, bien au fond. Dans ce jardin. Quelques fleurs, un peu d'ombre et puis la douleur. Mets-les là, cache les bien surtout, là où personne ne peut les voir. Là où toi tu ne peux pas les voir.”
― Federico Moccia, Ho voglia di te

“Nada receiem, a sombra é apenas uma outra forma de luz

In "Um companheiro inesquecível", página 53”
― Susana Tamaro

“He's looking into the night, in case a shadow comes to listen and look.”
― Herta Müller, The Passport

“To live in the shadow of another person...to desire to be adored as that person is....is the weakest ambition of all. Find yourself. Be loved as yourself.”
― Faye Hall

“In the forestlichen writhes and assembles itself into signs to light my path through the deep dark north shadow; and I emerge at last onto a hillside strewn with logogrammatic stones, and scramble away from spruce tops." in the poem "Beyond the Beacon" from Terra Affirmative.”
― Jay Woodman, Riding the Escalator and Terra Affirmative

“They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Father, be near as we are surrounded by this cloud of deep suffering. Open our eyes to see that you are all things, the light and the darkness, not only those things that seem good in our eyes, but the horrifying unexplainable. Wrap us up inside of the cloud and reveal the mysteries that can only be learned in places of sorrow, that when we walk out we will be as Moses, transformed by the shadow and beaming with the radiant light of your glory. Give us the strength to love on, though our hearts are broken.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“Cine sunt eu? Nici măcar o umbrăâ€�”
― Åžtefan Bolea, Caietul Roxanei ÅŸi alte Jurnale

“I see my skeleton walking down the street now. I’m walking behind it. Our feet touch the ground at the same time. I am my own shadow. The road we’re walking along looks familiar. The trees lining the pavement have been bleached by the sun. There are stone steps on my left. I climb them. This is the route I used to take after school. It’s very dark. The skeleton has disappeared.”
― Ma Jian, Beijing Coma

“It [moonlight] had a tentative grip on their shadows, as though the irregular shapes had been borrowed momentarily from the dark expanses left and right.”
― Scott Wyatt, Dimension M

“Hakikatleri örten bir perdedir karanlık. Onun saklı dünyasına tek tanıklık edense peÅŸinden ayrılmayan gölgesidir.”
― Karen Chance, Claimed by Shadow

“If shadows were caused by the interplay between light and Life, a child's was still forming. An adult's was inextricably bound to his body, but a child had a tenuous relationship to his own permanence, and thus, his own shadow.”
― Anne Ursu, The Shadow Thieves