Shade Fright Quotes

That's right ... I'm Gandalf with boobs.

(Valerie Stevens.)

~ Sean Cummings

I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, through wearing years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may. ~ Bram Stoker

Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?"

Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to.

"Malaysia?"

"The stitch-count's dead on, but they still haven't mastered the thread-tension."

"Oh."

"Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highlighters, in a really nasty fluorescent shade."

"Are you joking?"

"Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?"

"Yes."

She never did call him "Colin," then or ever. "You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly oblique."

"How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?"

"Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law. ~ William Gibson

Ten strong things have
been created in the world. The rock is hard, but the iron cleaves it. The iron is hard, but the fire
softens it. The fire is hard, but the water quenches it. The water is strong, but the clouds bear it. The
clouds are strong, but the wind20 scatters them. The wind is strong, but the body bears it. The body is strong, but fright crushes it. Fright is strong, but wine banishes it. Wine is strong, but sleep works it
off. Death is stronger than all, and charity saves from death. ~ Rabbi Judah

A lime tart with pomegranate glaze."
I put the tart on the counter. The crust was the perfect shade of golden brown, and as I cut into it, the bright red glaze contrasted beautifully with the pale green lime custard filling. ~ Rajani LaRocca

Janitorial"

All morning he drifts the spacious lawns
like a gleaner, picking up this and that,
the summer clouds immense and building
toward afternoon, when the heat drives him
under the shade of the oak trees in the quad
and then along cool corridors inside
to pull down last term's flyers

For the chamber recital, the poetry reading,
the lecture on the ethics of cloning,
the dinner with some ambassador,
the debate between Kant and Heidegger,
the frat party, the sorority party, the kegger,
the weekend Bergman festival, the Wednesday
screening of Dumb and Dumber. He says
hello to fine young ladies, and tries
not to dwell on their halter tops,
their tanned thighs, shorts up to here.

At five he climbs into an old, dumpster-colored
olds, lights up and heads home
across the barge-ridden river in its servitude
to East St. Louis, where you know
this poem - glib, well-meaning, trivial--
grows tongue-tied, and cannot follow. ~ George Bilgere

As they left, the girls were choking with laughter, but once they reached Mersault's house and the cool shade of the rooms, which emphasized the dazzling whiteness of the sun-drenched garden walls, they discovered a silent harmony that Catherine expressed by the desire to take a sunbath on the terrace. ~ Albert Camus

Beauty walks this world. It ages everything.
I am far and I am an animal and I am just another I-am poem,
          a we-see poem, a they-love poem.
The green. All the different windows.
There is so much stone here. And grass. So beautiful each
          translucent electric blade.
And the noise. Cheers folding into traffic. These things.
          Things that have been already said many times:
leaf, zipper, sparrow, lintel, scarf, window shade. ~ Peter Gizzi

As it fell upon a day in the merry month of May, sitting in a pleasant shade which a grove of myrtles made. ~ Richard Barnfield

Let no one reduce to tears or reproach
This statement of the mastery of God,
Who, with magnificent irony, gave
Me at once both books and night

Of this city of books He pronounced rulers
These lightless eyes, who can only
Peruse in libraries of dreams
The insensible paragraphs that yield

With every new dawn. Vainly does the day
Lavish on them its infinite books,
Arduous as the arduous manuscripts
Which at Alexandria did perish.

Of hunger and thirst (a Greek story tells us)
Dies a king amidst fountains and gardens;
I aimlessly weary at the confines
Of this tall and deep blind library.

Encyclopedias, atlases, the East
And the West, centuries, dynasties
Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies
Do walls proffer, but pointlessly.

Slow in my shadow, I the hollow shade
Explore with my indecisive cane;
To think I had imagined Paradise
In the form of such a library.

Something, certainly not termed
Fate, rules on such things;
Another had received in blurry
Afternoons both books and shadow.

Wandering through these slow corridors
I often feel with a vague and sacred dread
That I am another, the dead one, who must
Have trodden the same steps at the same time.

Which of the two is now writing this poem
Of a plural I and of a single shadow?
How important ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Lay not the plummet to the line; religion hath no landmarks; no human keenness can discern the subtle shades of faith. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

Temple of Suma
hearing the unblown flute
in the deep shade of trees
sumadera ya / fukanu fue kiku / koshitayami ~ Matsuo Basho

Nothing grows among its pinnacles; there is no shade except under great toadstools of sandstone whose bases have been eaten to the shape of wine glasses by the wind. Everything is flaking, cracking, disintegrating, wearing away in the long, inperceptible weather of time. The ash of ancient volcanic outbursts still sterilizes its soil, and its colors in that waste are the colors that flame in the lonely sunsets on dead planets. ~ Loren Eiseley

I started out doing my mother's nightclub act, and I had stage fright. ~ Carrie Fisher

Teach me your mood, O patient stars. Who climb each night, the ancient sky. leaving on space no shade, no scars, no trace of age, no fear to die. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I didn't even get to the end of the block before I had to stop. As I clutched my knees and wheezed, I caught my reflection in a car window. My face was a violent shade of Call the Ambulance red. My chest heaved like a monstrous jelly. ~ Shauna Reid

Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, her father's plantation, ~ Margaret Mitchell

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade but in the sunshine of life; & thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine. I will recur for proof to the days we have lately passed. On these indeed the sun shone brightly. ~ Thomas Jefferson

My eye was drawn to a bright green hue, the same shade as a poisonous Amazonian frog, the tiny, delightfully deadly ones. ~ Gail Honeyman

I remembered you, when I kissed your man face, slowly, slowly kissed it, and when the time came to kiss your eyes - I remembered that then I had tasted the salt in my mouth, and that the salt of tears in your eyes was my love for you. But, what bound me most of all in a fright of love, had been, in the depth of the depths of the salt, your saltless and innocent and childish substance: with my kiss your deepest insipid life was given to me, and kissing your face was the saltless and busy patient work of love, it was woman weaving a man, just as you had woven me, neutral crafting of life. ~ Clarice Lispector

Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion. ~ George Eliot

A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know. ~ James Russell Lowell

To begin by bluster, but afterwards to take fright at the enemy's numbers, shows a supreme lack of intelligence. ~ Sun Tzu

I would, but I can't. Like a cord between us, it binds me to you. where you go, i must follow. if you go to far, i am compelled to search for you until i find you. if i try to run, i would freeze in my steps and be made to turn back. ~ Alexia Purdy

Grey is the shade of life, like shadows. ~ Aporva Kala

Oh, my. What a lovely shade of bitch you're wearing today.
T-SHIRT ~ Darynda Jones

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? ~ Allen Ginsberg

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines. ~ Thomas Hardy

Are you saying I should run after her?"

"Crawl, actually, if I were you," recommended Aral. "Crawl fast. Slither under her door, go belly-up, let her stomp on you till she gets it out of her system. Then apologize some more. You may yet save the situation." Aral's eyes were openly alight with amusement now.

"What do you call that? Total surrender?" said Kou indignantly.

"No. I'd call it winning." His voice grew a shade cooler. "I've seen the war between men and women descend to scorched-earth heroics. Pyres of pride. You don't want to go down that road. I guarantee it. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

I'm astonished how little fright I have of my own imagination. It really does baffle me that I don't get more scared because I'm capable of thinking up things that are so awful. On any given day I can imagine the worst. ~ Robert Reed

Our life is our own to-day, to-morrow you will be dust, a shade, and a tale that is told. Live mindful of death; the hour flies. ~ Aulus Persius Flaccus

She opens the door to her grandfather's bedroom and stops. Below her, the man pauses again. Has he heard her? Is he climbing more quietly? Out in the world waits a multitude of sanctuaries - gardens full of bright green wind; kingdoms of hedges; deep pools of forest shade through which butterflies float thinking only of nectar. She can get to none of them. ~ Anthony Doerr

Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization. ~ Larry Niven

sun caught the edge of his belt buckle, projecting a flash that shimmered across the desert plain. A shrill whistle sounded, and as I stepped to the right I caught sight of his shadow spilling a whole other set of sophisms from an entirely different angle. - I been here before, haven't I? He just sat there staring out at the plain. Son of a bitch, I thought. He's ignoring me. - Hey, I said, I'm not the dead, not a shade passing. I'm flesh and blood here. He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and started writing. - You got to at least look at me, I said. After all, it is my dream. I drew closer. Close enough to see what he was writing. He had his notebook open to a blank page and three words suddenly materialized. Nope, it's mine. - Well, I'll be damned, I murmured. I ~ Patti Smith

Don't leave me," I yell as he walks down the path leading to another life.
Turning and glancing at me over his shoulder, his eyes are no longer gleaming their perfect shade of green; they're cloudy, hazy even. "I'm not," he says as he keeps walking. "You left me, beautiful girl. ~ Kim Karr

The world was cruel and sudden. This he knew for sure. Relax for a moment, breathe in the scent of a rose, rest in the shade, pet a dog, take a sip of lemonade, fall in love with a dreamy-eyed girl or a haunted faced man, and you are just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Buzzing around the lemonade, you'll find flies. Follow the flies and you'll find death. ~ Kathy Hepinstall

Of all the phantoms fleeting in the mist
Of time, though meagre all and ghostly thin;
Most unsubstantial, unessential shade
Was earthly fame. ~ Robert Pollok

One candle is enough. Its gentle light will be more suitable, will be more gracious when the Shades arrive, the Shades of Love. ~ C.P. Cavafy

You shall be my roots and
I will be your shade,
though the sun burns my leaves.
You shall quench my thirst and
I will feed you fruit,
though time takes my seed.
And when I'm lost and can tell nothing of this earth
you will give me hope.
And my voice you will always hear.
And my hand you will always have.
For I will shelter you.
And I will comfort you.
And even when we are nothing left,
not even in death,
I will remember you. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

It is of course perfectly natural to assume that everyone else is having a far more exciting time than you. Human beings, for instance, have a phrase that describes this phenomenon, 'The other man's grass is always greener.'
The Shaltanac race of Broopkidren 13 had a similar phrase, but since their planet is somewhat eccentric, botanically speaking, the best they could manage was, 'The other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet.' And so the expression soon fell into disuse, and the Shaltanacs had little option but to become terribly happy and contented with their lot, much to the surprise of everyone else in the Galaxy who had not realized that the best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it. ~ Douglas Adams

And hard times are good in their own way, too. Because the only way you can achieve true happiness is if you experience true sadness as well. It's all about light and shade. Balance. ~ Gabrielle Williams

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,
Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before. ~ Wendell Berry