thread quotes

Consider every moment past A thread from life's frayed mantle cast.

-Abu'l-'Ala   Al-Ma'arri
c.1000  Luzu'  miyya'  t, stanza 57 (translated by R  A Nicholson in Studies in Islamic Poetry,1921).

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

- Paul pseudonym of  Paul Benjamin Auster
  In the Sunday Times,16  Apr.

Behold, whenwe come intotheland, thoushalt bind this line of scarlet thread in the window which thou didst let us down by.

-Bible (Old Testament)
Joshua 2:18.

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass.

-John, 1st BaronTweedsmuir Buchan
  The Power-House, ch.3,'Tells of a Midsummer Night'.

I span and Eve span A thread to bind the heart of man!

- Dame MaryJean ne  e Mary Jean Cameron Gilmore
  The Passionate Heart and Other Poems,'Eve-song'.

Our style should be as a skein of silk, to be carried and found by the right thread, not ravelled and perplexed; then all is a knot, a heap.

- Ben Jonson
Timber: or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (published 1640).

I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hands' weaving.

-John Keats
  'I had a Dove and the Sweet Dove Died'.

A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.

- Heinz R(udolf) Pagels
  The Dreams of Reason.

The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.

- Alexander Pope
  An Essay on Man, epistle1, l.217^8.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: So this winged hour is dropt to us from above. Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, This close-companioned inarticulate hour When twofold silence was the song of love.

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The House of Life,'Silent Noon', pt.1.

   The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarilyperhaps not possiblychronological† It isthe continuousthread of revelation.

- Eudora Welty
  OneWriter's Beginnings, II.'Learning to See'.