Mask Of Shadows Quotes

I would remember them forever–their names, my reasons, the way their bodies slumped in death and their eyes stared through me. If I stopped, if I let their deaths weigh me down and keep me from being Opal, it was all for nothing. There was no going back. I was what I was, and they were a part of me now. ~ Linsey Miller

...thus our State, which is also yours, will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. ~ Plato

Isaac's face lit up. The phrase was literally true in his case, for his cheeks and the tip of his nose shone rosily and his blue eyes were suddenly as flooded with light as sapphires held to the sun. In the country of his mind the advancing shadows were halted and rolled back upon themselves like the fen mists when the wind suddenly freshened from the sea. He glowed and the Dean felt a pang of sadness. What would this man have been, what would he have done, had he not been so wrenched from the true by the sufferings of his boyhood? Yet perhaps without them he would not have been Bella's fairy man. Such twistings sometimes forced out poison but at other times honey. It depended what was at the heart of a man. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy. ~ Ian McEwan

I've got two neptunes here," said Harry after a while, frowning down at his piece of parchment, "that can't be right, can it?"
"Aaaaah," said Ron, imitating Professor Trelawney's mystical whisper, "when two neptunes appear in the sky, it is a sure sign that a midget in glasses is being born, Harry ... "
Seamus and Dean, who were working nearby, sniggered loudly, though not loud enough to mask the excited squeals from Lavender Brown- "Oh Professor, look! I think I might've gotten an unexpected planet! Oooh, which one's that, Professor?"
"It is Uranus, my dear," said Professor Trelawney, peering down at the chart.
"Can I get a look at Uranus too, Lavender?" said Ron. ~ J.K. Rowling

When the whistling-thrush released
A deep sweet secret on the trembling air;
Blackbird on the wing, bird of the forest shadows,
Black rose in the long ago summer,
This was your song:
It isn't time that's passing by,
It is you and I. ~ Ruskin Bond

Being in a shadow is never just as simple as stepping out of it. Shadows can camouflage a lot of things. ~ Leah Henderson

All the romantic nonsense about depression somehow making one into a creature of unique sensibilities is easy to agree with when I feel good. Then I'm sharper, superior for having weathered something terribly difficult, or just plain pleased to having been gotten away with something once again - like the snow day after the night's homework I did not do. All of it stands up to the light, but it's bullshit in the shadows. I do not care about unique sensibilities. All I care about is surviving. My goal in life is to get through the days. ~ Martha Manning

The hall towered,
gold-shingled and gabled, and the guest slept in it
until the black raven with raucous glee
announced heaven's joy, and a hurry of brightness
overran the shadows. ~ Seamus Heaney

As he reads, his eyes graze each poem's lines like a needle over an LP's grooves, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he is looking for is key: a gap in the book's mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings- reading sideways, reading upside down, reading white space instead of text- but the words always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions. ~ Martin Seay

A problem is an answer waiting to be opened ~ Peter Lerangis

Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or all men's lives like the lives of us good people - like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords - broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows? ~ Ford Madox Ford

I could ever tell him about myself that he would judge or criticize. My own glints of darkness did not frighten him; he had such darkness of his own that nobody else's shadows scared him.
Most of all, though, he listened. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Alice in Darkness

Forget tears. Chasing
white animals with timepieces
in this drug-trip landscape
can only lead to more of same.
Hedgehogs, playing cards, paintbrushes:
full of undisclosed danger.
Didn't your mother tell you
not to kiss strangers?
That Cheshire smile shouldn't fool you.
Pull your skirt down.
Your nails are growing so fast
you're hardly human.
Alice, fight your version of Bedlam
as long as you can.
Sleep the sweet dream away
from that gooey looking glass, or mushrooms,
or the fear of your own body.
Forget what the night tastes like.
Stop wondering through the shadows,
holding your neck out
for the slice of the axe. ~ Jeannine Hall Gailey

To Jodi survival is really just a game. Does Jodi really care about her freedom? Or does Jodi care more about the exposure and attention all of this brings? She may have been packing a getaway car with weapons, but perhaps getting caught was what she really wanted and needed. To be talked to, listened to, for the world to show an interest in her. No longer in the shadows, now we could all see Jodi. ~ Lisa Wilson

Logan glanced at the clock on the cooker: nearly five minutes fast. The room was bathed in the pale orange glow of the overcast sky, the back garden a jungle of silhouettes and shadows through the window. He filled the kettle, then poured half of it out, before sticking it on to boil. The growing rumble drowned out the babble on his Airwave handset as DI Bell got his firearms team into place. ~ Stuart MacBride

The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness. ~ Kobo Abe

The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine ...
And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote: ... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment. ~ Harlan Ellison

A song she heard
Of cold that gathers
Like winter's tongue
Among the shadows
It rose like blackness
In the sky
That on volcano's
Vomit rise
A Stone of ruin
From burn to chill
Like black moonrise
Her voice fell still ... ~ Robert Fanney

None escape their shadows ~ Zed

The Mask "Put off that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes." "O no, my dear, you make so bold To find if hearts be wild and wise, And yet not cold." "I would but find what's there to find, Love or deceit." "It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what's behind." "But lest you are my enemy, I must enquire." "O no, my dear, let all that be, What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me?" ~ William Butler Yeats

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. ~ Theodore Dreiser

Whatever the image of yourself, it's a mask and it's hiding emptiness. ~ Adyashanti

A street full of shadows will teach you what life is much better than the street full of lights! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Forgiveness, not for those who act in malice; those who plot with secrecy between shadows and the soul lost in the carnality of flesh ... but forgiveness for those whose circumstance renders them a slave. Whose life decisions imprisoned their fate; like an assassin sent to murder a wife. Business will always be business, we leave it once we depart this physicality and transcend into the next; however, what we cannot leave behind, is the truth of our intent. For the guilty shall be segregated from the innocent , and of the innocent, the righteous will be few ~ Alejandro C. Estrada

John Cassavetes was there at night while I was working. After they [with his friends] discussed as much live TV as they felt they needed to, they started improvising scenes just for the fun of it and one of those scenes everybody got very interested in and it turned into Shadows [1959]. That movie was entirely improvised. ~ Gena Rowlands

Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas. ~ Alexander MacLaren

If the beneficiaries of globalization are tourists who can travel as they choose, then the losers of globalization are the ones forced to wander: those who move in the shadows, those whose moving is unwanted, and those who work low-paying jobs in service to tourists (such as janitors at airports or hotel housekeepers.) ~ Andrew Root

At its worst human life is not tragic but unmeaning. The soul is broken, but life lingers on. As the will fails, the mask of tragedy falls aside. What remains is only suffering. The last sorrow cannot be told. If the dead could speak we would not understand them. We are wise to hold to the semblance of tragedy; the truth unveiled would only blind us. ~ John N. Gray

. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must've passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . .

But anyway so Bickle said, "Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?"

I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.

He said, "You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there's some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there'd have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That's a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empir ~ Ryan Boudinot

You're not so different from Kiernan anyway. You both have lived long enough to lose friends - too long, maybe. Perhaps that's why the Minstrel wears a mask and keeps people at arm's length: he too knows the pain of loving too much. ~ Jenelle Leanne Schmidt

The self is who we truly are, but the persona or mask (the word comes from the Latin for an actor's mask) is the face we turn to the world in order to deal with it. A persona is absolutely necessary, but the problem is that we often become identified with it, to the detriment of our self, a dilemma that the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre recognized in his notion of mauvaise foi, or "bad faith," when one becomes associated exclusively with one's social role. ~ Gary Lachman

But spending too much time in the human world does strange things to them. Perhaps it is the amount of iron and technology that is so fatal to their existence. They start to lose themselves, a little at a time, until they are only shadows of their former selves, empty husks covered in glamour to make them look real. Eventually, they simply cease to exist. ~ Julie Kagawa

There's a kind of magic in masks. Masks conceal one face, but they reveal another. The one that only comes out in darkness. I bet you could do just what you liked, behind a mask ... ? ~ Terry Pratchett

As the carriage rolled under the Institute's gates, James saw his parents standing in the courtyard.
"And where have you been?" Will demanded as James clambered out of the carriage. The others leaped down behind him, the girls, being in gear, needing no help to dismount. "You stole our carriage."
James wished he could tell his father the truth, but that would be breaking their sworn promise to Ragnor.
"It's only the second-best carriage," James protested.
"Remember when Papa stole Uncle Gabriel's carriage? It's a proud family tradition," said Lucie, as the group of them approached the Institute steps.
"I did not raise you to be horse thieves and scallywags," said Will. "And I recall very clearly that I told you - "
"Thank you for letting them borrow the carriage to come and get me," said Cordelia. Her eyes were wide, and she looked entirely innocent. James felt an amused stab of surprise: she was an interestingly skilful liar. "I had very much wanted to come to the Institute and see what I could do to help."
Will softened immediately. "Of course. You are always welcome here, Cordelia. ~ Cassandra Clare

You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.
In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being. It was an empty world because no man had yet joined sticks to make a house or scratched the earth to make a road or embedded the transient symbols of his artifice in the clean horizon. But it was not a sterile world. It held the genesis of life and lay deep and anticipant under the sky. ~ Beryl Markham

Maybe it's the shadows that beckon, but I've created some of my nastiest work in the middle of the night. ~ Megan Denby

I was focused before - obsessed, really - with the appearance of perfection. But what did that ever bring me but pain? Pain and not seeing people for who they really are. If I ever get out of here, I'll look at people differently. I'll look for their true selves beneath the mask of their bodies. I'll look at soul. ~ Cheryl Rainfield

Today we celebrate light and honor the wisdom of the shadows. In connecting with the natural world in a way that honors the sacred immanence in all things, we establish a resonance with the seasons. ~ Dacha Avelin

I turned back to the shrike, but the beak of his mask grazed up my neck and warm lips brushed my ear. Thrills coursed through me, but I didn't move until he started away. I caught his hand. "Wait."
He'd felt right. I knew who I needed him to be, even if the way we'd danced was not how- That kind of passion he reserved for music. Not me.
A cold breeze made me shiver as I tightened my grip on his. Stepped closer. Searched his eyes. His lips tilted up at one corner, like amusement. I'd known, but still, the familiar expression stunned me so much I almost didn't act.
I kissed him.
Rather, I pressed my mouth against his and hoped he wouldn't run. It would probably kill me.
Three long seconds and he only gasped and tightened his hands on my back. Then, with a soft moan, he opened his mouth and kissed me. It wasn't an easy, sweet kiss like I'd imagined my first would be, but frustraeted and hungry. That was good, better than easy and sweet, because after everything, I was frustrated and hungry for him, too.
His beak scraped my cheek, but I ignored it while the tip of his tongue danced over my lips. ~ Jodi Meadows

We are all of the same substance, the same life. Though there are many differences between us, those are merely the shadows that delineate our boundaries. Our light is the same. ~ Sally Wiener Grotta

Confess your sins to one another" (James 5:16). Those who remain alone with their evil are left utterly alone. It is possible that Christians may remain lonely in spite of daily worship together, prayer together, and all their community through service - that the final breakthrough to community does not occur precisely because they enjoy community with one another as pious believers, but not with one another as those lacking piety, as sinners. For the pious community permits no one to be a sinner. Hence all have to conceal their sins from themselves and from the community. We are not allowed to be sinners. Many Christians would be unimaginably horrified if a real sinner were suddenly to turn up among the pious. So we remain alone with our sin, trapped in lies and hypocrisy, for we are in fact sinners.
However, the grace of the gospel, which is so hard for the pious to comprehend, confronts us with the truth. It says to us, you are a sinner, a great, unholy sinner. Now come, as the sinner that you are, to your God who loves you. For God wants you as you are, not desiring anything from you - a sacrifice, a good deed - but rather desiring you alone. "My child, give me your heart" (Prov. 23:26). God has come to you to make the sinner blessed. Rejoice! This message is liberation through truth. You cannot hide from God. The mask you wear in the presence of other people won't get you anywhere in the presence of God. God wants to see you as you are, wants to be gracious to you. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer