“
Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March.
.........
I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world...I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.
I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness...Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.
I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.
There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.
I am thawing.
”
”
Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)
“
Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything.
”
”
Agustina Bazterrica (Tender Is the Flesh)
“
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
Of her life, and weaves them gratefully
Into a single cloth –
It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
And clears it for a different celebration.
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
”
”
Richard P. Feynman
“
A spider lives inside my head
Who weaves a strange and wondrous web
Of silken threads and silver strings
To catch all sorts of flying things,
Like crumbs of thoughts and bits of smiles
And specks of dried-up tears,
And dust of dreams that catch and cling
For years and years and years...
”
”
Shel Silverstein (Every Thing on It)
“
Love doesn't come with an on-off switch. It's made of too many threads of memory and hope and heartache that weave themselves into the very core of who you are.
”
”
Martina Boone (Compulsion (The Heirs of Watson Island, #1))
“
Love weaves itself from hundreds of threads.
”
”
David Levithan
“
The Weaver”
“My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I cannot choose the colors
He weaveth steadily.
Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper
And I the underside.
Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas
And reveal the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned
He knows, He loves, He cares;
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives the very best to those
Who leave the choice to Him.
”
”
Grant Colfax Tullar
“
Nothing ever begins.
There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs.
The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.
”
”
Clive Barker (Weave World)
“
Marvelous,” she said. “Tell me about this tapestry.”
Arachne’s lips curled over her mandibles. “Why do you care? You're about to die.”
“Well, yes,” Annabeth said. “But the way you captured the light is amazing. Did you use real gold thread for the sunbeams?
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
“
Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. in life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly's wings.
”
”
Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees)
“
Not one day in anyone’s life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy, or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s-syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness—even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile—reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined—those dead, those living, those generations yet to come—that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength—to the very survival of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.
”
”
Dean Koontz (From the Corner of His Eye)
“
His soul's fabric was weaving itself with mine. I loved the frayed ends where it came unraveled, and I loved the strength at its firm, solid center.
I loved every thread.
”
”
Jeri Smith-Ready (Shine (Shade, #3))
“
You can weave your life so long -- only so long, and then a thing in the world out of your control will tug at one vital thread and leave you patternless and subdued.
”
”
Patricia A. McKillip (The Forgotten Beasts of Eld)
“
I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best....
”
”
M.F.K. Fisher (The Art of Eating)
“
Your life is always under construction. It is your job to learn how
to untangle the threads and weave a tapestry that matches your desires.
”
”
Dannye Williamsen
“
When you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit.
Work is love made visible
”
”
Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
“
The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.
”
”
W.B. Yeats
“
Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you’ll find an edge to cut you.” I looked into my own darkness. I knew what it was to be trapped, and to watch ruination. “Each day the memories weigh a little heavier. Each day they drag you down that bit further. You wind them around you, a single thread at a time, and you weave your own shroud, you build a cocoon, and in it madness grows.” The lights pulsed beneath my fingers, ebbing and flowing to the beat of my voice. “You sit here with your yesterdays queuing at your shoulder. You listen to their reproach and curse those that gave you life.
”
”
Mark Lawrence (Prince of Thorns (Broken Empire, #1))
“
No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.
”
”
Mary Doria Russell (A Thread of Grace)
“
Perhaps he could still weave together the broken threads of his life. And yet, I wanted him here now. I needed him here. In the darkness, if I sat very still, I could almost feel his presence by me, quite near, but not too near. Didn't I promise to keep you safe, he would say softly. I have never broken a promise. Don't look so worried, Jenny. And yet, he would be careful. Careful not to move too close. Careful not to frighten me. Waiting still. I am your shelter. Don't be afraid.
”
”
Juliet Marillier (Daughter of the Forest (Sevenwaters, #1))
“
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection.
”
”
Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion)
“
As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead.
”
”
Isabel Allende (Maya's Notebook)
“
We don’t accomplish anything in the world alone and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry off one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that create something.
”
”
Sandra Day O'Connor
“
Here's to the bridge-builders, the hand-holders, the light-bringers, those extraordinary souls wrapped in ordinary lives who quietly weave threads of humanity into an inhumane world. They are the unsung heroes in a world at war with itself. They are the whisperers of hope that peace is possible. Look for them in this present darkness. Light your candle with their flame. And then go. Build bridges. Hold hands. Bring light to a dark and desperate world. Be the hero you are looking for. Peace is possible. It begins with us.
”
”
L.R. Knost
“
The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing.
”
”
Alexis Hall (Glitterland (Spires, #1))
“
There's a saying in Hebrew, 'No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.
”
”
Mary Doria Russell (A Thread of Grace)
“
Sharing a life threads more than flesh and blood together. It weaves her memories in and around and through mine. The more I know of her, the more I share of her, the more I love her in a way the boy I used to be never knew how to love. Eo was a flame, dancing against the wind. I tried to catch her. Tried to hold her. But she was never meant to be held. My wife is not as fickle as a flame. She is an ocean. I knew from the first that I cannot own her, cannot tame her, but I am the only storm that moves her depths and stirs her tides. And that is more than enough.
”
”
Pierce Brown (Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga, #4))
“
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
”
”
Horace Mann
“
The will of this boy thief flows in golden streams. It is the thread with which I weave, the colors with which I paint, the element with which I create.
”
”
Jessica Khoury (The Forbidden Wish (The Forbidden Wish, #1))
“
The Weaver
My life is but a weaving
between my Lord and me;
I cannot choose the colors
He worketh steadily.
Oft times He weaveth sorrow
And I, in foolish pride,
Forget He sees the upper,
And I the underside.
Not til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly,
Shall God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the Weaver's skillful hand,
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.
”
”
Benjamin Malachi Franklin
“
Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?
”
”
H. Rider Haggard (She (She, #1))
“
Chance. It weaves through our lives like a golden thread, sometimes knotting, tangling, and breaking along the way. Loose threads are left hanging, but the in and out, the back and forth continues, the weaving goes on. It doesn't stop.
”
”
Mary E. Pearson (The Miles Between)
“
Our destiny is aligned with our heart's innermost longing, a longing embedded within our soul before birth. This longing is a unique pattern or configuration reminiscent of the constellations in the night sky. When we express (press out) our unique configuration, it shines through us with an otherworldly luminosity, manifesting abundance in our lives and the lives of others. Our sole task is to yoke our inner destiny, thread it through our lives and weave it into the world. All else is just shadows and dust.
”
”
Thea Euryphaessa (Running Into Myself)
“
It will be very interesting one day to follow the pattern of our life as it is spread out like a beautiful tapestry. As long as we live here we see only the reverse side of the weaving, and very often the pattern, with its threads running wildly, doesn't seem to make sense. Some day, however, we shall understand.
In looking back over the years we can discover how a red thread goes through the pattern of our life: the Will of God.
”
”
Maria Augusta von Trapp
“
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 hand's weaving.
”
”
John Keats (The Complete Poems)
“
Nothing is predetermined for us, and yet all our possible choices are threads in the vast weave of things, so that we have free will even though the consequences of our will are predictable.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Innocence)
“
There's something about imminent death that makes all the threads weave into a picture...
”
”
Lauren DeStefano (Perfect Ruin (Internment Chronicles, #1))
“
...where your mind goes...energy flows
”
”
Penny Reilly (Silver's Threads, Book 1 Spinning Colours Darkly)
“
There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.
”
”
John Gregory Brown (Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery)
“
I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world. The tiny elf dancer became a wooden doll whose strings were jerked by people not paying attention. I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.
I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness. Cassie did, too. We leaned on each other, lost in the dark and wandering in endless circles. She got too tired an went to sleep. Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.
I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.
There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.
I am thawing.
”
”
Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)
“
I can weave threads of myself into a tapestry already designed by others.
”
”
Sara Raasch (Snow Like Ashes (Snow Like Ashes, #1))
“
He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“
The Wheel of Time weaves the Pattern of the Ages, and lives are the threads it weaves. No one can tell how the thread of his own life will be woven into the Pattern, or how the thread of a people will be woven.
”
”
Robert Jordan (The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, #1))
“
There are days when I think there really is some huge great tapestry of a plan out there and we're all woven into it - this fabulous, complex pattern of life and death, full of recurring motifs and waves of color, and we're each one tiny thread in the weave.
”
”
Jane Johnson (The Tenth Gift)
“
Warp threads are thicker than the weft, and made of a coarser wool as well. I think of them as like wives. Their work is not obvious - all you can see are the ridges they make under the colorful weft threads. But if they weren't there, there would be no tapestry. Georges would unravel without me.
”
”
Tracy Chevalier (The Lady and the Unicorn)
“
Love weaves itself from hundreds of threads. Happenstances. I just happened to be one of them.
”
”
David Levithan (How They Met, and Other Stories)
“
In a city the multiplicity of threads forced a whirling confusion on the loom but here the simple pattern and the slow weaving made purpose more discernible.
”
”
Elizabeth Goudge (The Scent of Water)
“
Embrace curiosity, be open, playful, and persistent.
”
”
Debra Kaye (Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovations)
“
Work with love, it is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart.
”
”
Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
“
The crimson thread of God's love that weaves its way throughout the story of His mercy in our life, stands out against the backdrop of the darkness which invades any valley.
”
”
Amy E. Tobin (Still, Love Remains: God's Crimson Threads of Grace)
“
I am my own tapestry, then, made as I could for myself. Some holes in my fabric have been made by others, some torn by chance. Missing threads in the weave represent all those I have loved who died so long before me
”
”
Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901)
“
Our lives have ebbs and flows. Ends and beginnings are illusions. Starting over is nothing more than recognizing The Pause before picking up your thread and continuing to weave your own story.
”
”
Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig (Circuit Train Your Brain: Daily Habits That Develop Resilience)
“
I may not have any power over it at the moment, but at some point that must change. I can be very patient. I am the end of all things, nephew mine. I shall be the last. When birth has ended, I wil cut Clotho's cord, and she will be no more. The time will come when every last thread has been measured, and I will snip Lachesis from the great weave. In the end only Death and I will remain. Then I will cut his thread, and it will be me alone. With my last strength I will close the shears on my own life. I am the end of everything, including you.
”
”
Kelly McCullough (WebMage (Webmage #1, Ravirn #1))
“
Science, in its search for light, has been eclipsed by powerful shadows: companies, creeds, and the dance of politics, where hidden governments weave threads in the darkness, serving not the dawn, but the darkness that engulfs. From the book Black Goo & Morgelos
”
”
Marcos Orowitz
“
Where had they all gone to, he often pondered; those threads he had once held together, how far had they scattered, some to break, others to weave into unknown patterns? The strange randomness of the world beguiled him, that randomness which never would, so long as the world lasted, give meaning to those choruses again.
”
”
James Hilton (Good-Bye, Mr. Chips)
“
I have pulled threads from magic tapestries already woven and used them to weave my own cloth.
”
”
Jane Yolen
“
A great perfume will weave an emotional thread in the fabric of our lives."
Marian Bendeth
Global Fragrance Expert
Sixth Scents
”
”
Marian Bendeth Global Fragrance Expert Sixth Scents
“
Look for patterns, and then ask why those patterns exist.
”
”
Debra Kaye (Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovations)
“
I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world.
”
”
Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)
“
A blanket is only as good as the thread you weave in.
”
”
Louise Blackwick (Vivian Amberville - The Weaver of Odds)
“
Live for a while in the books you love. Learn from them what is worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be returned to you a thousand times over. Whatever your life may become, these books -of this I am certain- will weave through the web of your unfolding. They will be among the strongest of all threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“
Our lives were a complex tapestry, and our woven strands were only meant to intersect at a small number of points in the time-conceived whole. An embroidered starburst, a missed warp, a complicated notion on the loom of time. We were always together, but meant to live our majorities apart, two golden threads wandering through a haunted textile life.
”
”
Courtney M. Privett (Mayfly Requiem (The Malora Octet, #1))
“
It was good to be a stranger in a land when you felt aggressive and acquisitive, but when you began to weave your horizons into some kind of shelter it was good to know that hands you loved had helped in their spinning - made you feel as if the threads would hold together better.
”
”
Zelda Fitzgerald (Save Me the Waltz)
“
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her life, and weaves them gratefully into a single cloth— it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall and clears it for a different celebration where the one guest is you. In the softness of evening it’s you she receives. You are the partner of her loneliness, the unspeaking center of her monologues. With each disclosure you encompass more and she stretches beyond what limits her, to hold you.
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke (Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God)
“
The happiest people I know are not those who find their golden ticket; they are those who, while in pursuit of worthy goals, discover and treasure the beauty and sweetness of the everyday moments. They are the ones who, thread by daily thread, weave a tapestry of gratitude and wonder throughout their lives. These are they who are truly happy.
”
”
Dieter F. Uchtdorf (Forget Me Not)
“
Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men. . . . Repeat, and cradle the pieces carefully, or events will scatter like marbles on a wooden floor.
”
”
Ann-Marie MacDonald (The Way the Crow Flies)
“
Then a ploughman said, speak to us of work: in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with inmost secrets.
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit .
It is to change all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit.
He who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler than he who ploughs the soil.
”
”
Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
“
Look for the silver lining in every cloud and those revelations will create the thread to weave the fabric of a renewed and joyous life.
”
”
Joy Smith (Empty Nest Cookbook)
“
Every subject spins out, like the spider's threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence.
”
”
Jakob Johann von Uexküll (A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning (Posthumanities))
“
All we’re doing is weaving together a life. Trying to see where the different threads take us.
”
”
Katy Hays (The Cloisters)
“
All life is one weaving, one design by the hand of the Creator, the Great Mystery. All life is connected, thread by thread.
”
”
William Kent Krueger (Trickster's Point (Cork O'Connor, #12))
“
We already have what we need—the opportunity to weave the tapestry of happiness every day with the needle and thread of our own mind.
”
”
Sakyong Mipham (Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies For Modern Life)
“
You can weave your life so long—only so long, and then a thing in the world out of your control will tug at one vital thread and leave you patternless and subdued.
”
”
Patricia A. McKillip (The Forgotten Beasts of Eld)
“
When the body perishes
all perishes
but the threads of memory
are woven of enduring atoms
I will pick these particles
weave the threads
and I will meet you yet again.
”
”
Amrita Pritam (ਮੈਂ ਤੇਨੁ ਫੇਰ ਮਿਲੰਗੀ)
“
Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas, #6))
“
Why does a young Muslim, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up in a bus full of innocent passengers? In our countries, religion is the sole source of education, and this is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched. He was not born a terrorist, and did not become a terrorist overnight. Islamic teachings played a role in weaving his ideological fabric, thread by thread, and did not allow other sources—I am referring to scientific sources—to play a role. It was these teachings that distorted this terrorist, and killed his humanity; it was not [the terrorist] who distorted the religious teachings, and misunderstood them, as some ignorant people claim. When you recite to a child still in his early years the verse 'They will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternative sides cut off,' regardless of this verse's interpretation, and regardless of the reasons it was conveyed, or its time, you have made the first step towards creating a great terrorist.
”
”
Wafa Sultan
“
There is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.
He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. 'What disturbs and alarms man,' said Epictetus, 'are not the things, but his opinions and fantasies about the things.
”
”
Ernst Cassirer (An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture)
“
God has created a huge, complex tapestry with our lives. It's got shadows and darkness shot through with highlights of gold. We can never go back and undo those threads and weave them into something else.
”
”
Elizabeth Camden (A Gilded Lady (Hope and Glory, #2))
“
My life is but a weaving, between my God and me, I do not choose the colors, He worketh steadily, Oftimes He weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride, Forget He sees the upper, and I the under side. Not till the loom is silent, and shuttles cease to fly, Will God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why. The dark threads are as needful in the skillful Weaver’s hand, As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned. (Anonymous)
”
”
Corrie ten Boom (Tramp for the Lord)
“
Long before God the Father, there she was – God the Mother. Where did she vanish to, this great mother goddess? How did we women become so completely dispossessed? It wasn’t that I wanted to replace a male god with a female god; it wasn’t that I wanted to find a religion at all. I was simply looking for some sense that women might have worth. And I found it: there in the old stories of my own native land, I found it. Filled with images of women creating, women weaving the world into being, I took up knitting. Thread by thread, stitch by stitch, I began to knit myself back into being. I had never thought of myself as being a particularly creative soul, but I discovered that creativity was a wide-ranging affair. I simply thought about what brought me joy, and I began to cultivate it. I dug my hands into this strange foreign soil, and I began to grow things. I began to reacquaint myself with the soft animal object that was my body. Slowly, spending more and more time outside, focusing on the wisdom of my senses rather than on what was going on inside my head, I began to weave myself back into the fabric of the Earth. Some
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Sharon Blackie (If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging)
“
..celestial threads weaving you into me..
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Megan Fox (Pretty Boys Are Poisonous: Poems)
“
Labels start out as little threads of self dissatisfaction but ultimately weave together into a straightjacket of self-condemnation
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Lysa TerKeurst (Unglued: Making Wise Choices in the Midst of Raw Emotions)
“
The threads of problems dangled in front of me, and I tried to think of a way to weave them into a solution. I
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Kiran Millwood Hargrave (The Girl of Ink and Stars)
“
Orito pictures the human mind that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.
”
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David Mitchell (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet)
“
It is critical to learn how to listen for what is not being said.
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Debra Kaye (Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovations)
“
We weave our lives out of threads of opportunity and stitches of chance,
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Alice Feeney (Rock Paper Scissors)
“
The threads of past and present are already irrevocably stitched and cannot be undone. But the threads of tomorrow may yet weave a different path.
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Elizabeth Lim (Her Radiant Curse)
“
Sharing a life threads more than flesh and blood together. It weaves her memories in and around and through mine.
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Pierce Brown (Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga, #4))
“
No matter how great a work of art is, it comes to an end. In fact, in order to be great, it must end. But life never comes to an end. When one thread is knotted, even when another is broken, it continues weaving together to an everlasting music, so that the whole of it can only be seen from the height of infinity.
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Juhea Kim (City of Night Birds)
“
am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world. The tiny elf dancer became a wooden doll whose strings were jerked by people not paying attention. I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.
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Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)
“
We don’t have to cling to someone in the hopes they’ll stick around, because the Lord holds the threads of that friendship. He’ll weave them into something new and beautiful when it’s time.
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Sophie Hudson (Giddy Up, Eunice: Because Women Need Each Other)
“
The truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from.
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Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI)
“
As far as I’m concerned, story is everything. It is why we get up in the morning and how we choose who to take to bed at night. Story is the thread that weaves together the very fabric of reality.
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J.K. Norry (Stumbling Backasswards Into the Light)
“
I remember Aeneas’ words as I remember the poet’s words. I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns as the shuttle returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it. I was a spinner, not a weaver, but I have learned to weave.
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Ursula K. Le Guin (Lavinia)
“
Never reproach him with his own weakness, for then he will become wholly weak. Never let him feel that but for you he would be useless, for then he will indeed become useless. You must search for the few strong threads in him and weave your fabric with those, and where the threads are weak, never trust to them. Supply your own in secret.
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Pearl S. Buck (Pavilion of Women)
“
That's why you look so tired, isn't it?" I murmured. "You used up all your magic to find me last night."
Owen shrugged as though it was nothing. But it wasn't nothing to me. Besides Finn and the Deveraux sisters, I couldn't even remember the last time someone had cared enough to come looking for me when I was in trouble. I was so used to being on my own for so long, always being the tough, strong, capable one, that I'd forgotten how nice it felt to have someone else look out for me.
To have someone else care about me.
And just like that, the fragile strings of my feelings for Owen joined together, all the tangled threads wrapping around and weaving their way through my heart. Scary and painful in some ways, but necessary in others too.
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Jennifer Estep (Tangled Threads (Elemental Assassin, #4))
“
Yet surely that story she had imagined was a real thing? If you created a story with your mind surely it was just as much there as a piece of needlework that you created with your fingers? You could not see it with your bodily eyes, that was all....the invisible world must be saturated with the stories that men tell both in their minds and by their lives. They must be everywhere, these stories, twisting together, penetrating existence like air breathed into the lungs, and how terrible, how awful, thought Henrietta, if the air breathed should be foul. How dare men live, how dare they think or imagine, when every action and every thought is a tiny thread to ar or enrich that tremendous tapestried story that man weaves on the loom that God has set up, a loom that stretches from heaven above to hell below, and from side to side of the universe...
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Elizabeth Goudge (A City of Bells (Torminster, #1))
“
Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything. He wishes he could hate someone for the death of his son.
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Agustina Bazterrica (Tender Is the Flesh)
“
We who work in fantasy today take the threads from all the story tellers of the past. From the ancient, many colored threads we work to weave a new cloth. If the landscape, the characters, and the creatures here call up the old tales told the beside the fire, when stories went from mouth to ear instead of page to eye then I have woven well and the dreamer continues to dream.
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Janet Lee Carey
“
My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded.
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Virginia Woolf (The Waves)
“
There was hair. So much hair. Dead hair, hair of my gone self, wisps of spiderweb hair, old uniform lint hair, pillow sponge and tangerine strings hair. A whole life pulled itself up by my hair, the hair that locked the year I broke my tooth, hair that locked the day we caught cane ashes in the yard. Hair of our lean years, hair of the fat, pollen of marigolds hair, my mother's aloe vera hair, my sisters weaving wild ixoras in my hair, the pull of the tides at our sea village hair, grits of sand hair, hair of salt tears, hair thick with the blood of my own cut wrists. Hair of my binding, hair of my unbeautiful wanting, hair of his bitter words, hair of the cruel world, hair roping me to my father's belt, hair wrestling the taunts of baldheads in the street, hair of my lone self, hair wrapped atop the ghost woman in white's hair, red thread of hair, centuries of hair, galloping future of incorrigible hair, all cut away from me.
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Safiya Sinclair (How to Say Babylon)
“
Peg came over with dinner tonight and told me about this dumb schmaltzy poem she heard someone read at an AA meeting. It got me thinking. It was about how while we are on earth, our limitations are such that we can only see the underside of the tapestry that God is weaving. God sees the topside, the whole evolving portrait and its amazing beauty, and uses us as the pieces of thread to weave the picture. We see the glorious colors and shadings, but we also see the knots and the threads hanging down, the think lumpy patches, the tangles. But God and the people in heaven with him see how beautiful the portraits in the tapestry are. The poem says in this flowery way that faith is about the willingness to be used by God wherever and however he most needs you, most needs the piece of thread that is your life. You give him your life to put through his needle, to use as he sees fit.
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Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
“
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart,
even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection,
even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy,
even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead
are standing about you and watching.
”
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Kahlil Gibran
“
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 hand's weaving;
Sweet little red feet! why should you die -
Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why?
You liv'd alone in the forest-tree,
Why, pretty thing! would you not live with me?
I kiss'd you oft and gave you white peas;
Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?
”
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John Keats
“
I was impressed by the delicate weaving of the numbers. No matter how carefully you unraveled a thread, a single moment of inattention could leave you stranded, with no clue what to do next. In all his years of study, the Professor had managed to glimpse several pieces of the lace. I could only hope that some part of him remembered the exquisite pattern.
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Yōko Ogawa (The Housekeeper and the Professor)
“
I can do things like that when I write—pluck any thread of want and weave a whole world.
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T Kira Madden (Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls)
“
Love is the thread that weaves our lives into a beautiful tapestry.
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Rendi Ansyah (Beyond the Bouquet: A Symphony of Love in Fifty Movements)
“
In manifestation, we are not passive observers but active participants, weaving the threads of our consciousness into the fabric of our reality.
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T.L. Workman (From Student to Teacher: A Journey of Transformation and Manifestation)
“
He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and to weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
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Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
“
And yes, all of a sudden she was scared. It was like a yellow thread weaving in and out of the bright red overblanket of her rage.
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Stephen King (Lisey's Story)
“
He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life, and to weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“
The will of this boy thief flows in golden streams. It is the thread with which I weave, the colors with which I paint, the element with which I create. Sand
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Jessica Khoury (The Forbidden Wish (The Forbidden Wish, #1))
“
It is human nature to weave our own thread into each story we tell, adding a little piece of ourselves into the narrative.
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Rosie Hewlett (Medusa)
“
strength isn’t always in the hunt but in the quiet resilience of weaving even when the thread is no longer read
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Willow Bowery (Tortured Poets)
“
We weave our lives out of threads of opportunity and stitches of chance, nobody wants a future full of holes.
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Alice Feeney (Rock Paper Scissors)
“
Math is a weave of many threads: the formal and the intuitive, the simple and the profound, the momentary and the eternal. Love the thread you love. But never mistake it for the tapestry.
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Ben Orlin (Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World)
“
Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.
”
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David Mitchell (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet)
“
The connections that bind us are astounding, as I’ve noted. The invisible threads weave in and around us in places and at times that we may not ever see, or that only make sense over time.
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R.J. Palacio (Pony)
“
Only the moonlit mind allows wonder, and it is in the thrall of wonder that you can see the intricate weave of the world of which you are but one thread, one fantastic and essential thread.
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Dean Koontz (The Moonlit Mind (Pendleton, #0.5))
“
From tattered flags and uniforms to friendships strained to the brink, the women of my country had always been the menders to all the things torn asunder. But now we’d do more than patch with needle and thread. We’d have to weave together a whole tapestry of American life with nothing but our own hands, our own crops, and our own ingenuity. And I would prove myself able to the task. There
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Stephanie Dray (America's First Daughter)
“
But you can't lose someone you truly love. Love doesn't come with an on-off switch. It's made of to many threads of memory and hope and heartache that weave themselves into the very core of who you are.
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Martina Boone (Compulsion (The Heirs of Watson Island, #1))
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I have learned that each and every piece of cloth embodies the spirit, skill, and personal history of an individual weaver. . . . It ties together with an endless thread the emotional life of my people.
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Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez
“
In quietness and trust is your strength.—Isaiah 30:15 In solitude, sacred embrace wraps fragile souls in vital grace, weaves trust with threads of perfect will, envelopes those quiet in strength surreal.
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The writers of Encouraging.com (God Moments: A Year in the Word)
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February arrives cold, wet and gray, her gifts disguised for only the most discerning spirits to see. Gentle is our path. Gratitude is the thread we weave into the fabric of our daily lives this month, giving thanks for our simply abundant lives and asking for the gift of one thing more: grateful hearts.
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Sarah Ban Breathnach (Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort of Joy)
“
You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons,
and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.
When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?
Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret.
But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written.
You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.
And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart,
even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection,
even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy,
even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead
are standing about you and watching.
Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, "He who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is nobler than he who ploughs the soil.
And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet."
But I say, not in sleep but in the overwakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass;
And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.
Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
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Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
“
Women – the Parcae and Moirai – weave human destiny; but they also cut the threads. In most folk representations, Death is woman and women mourn the dead because death is their work.fn6 Thus, Mother Earth has a face of darkness: she is chaos, where everything comes from and must return to one day; she is Nothingness.
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Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex (Vintage Classics))
“
If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.
Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared.
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Stephen Lee
“
I thought of our family, sometimes, as a tapestry: a perfect blending and weaving of colored threads that produced an enviable picture on our surface, while underneath we were a tangled maze of knots and stitches, colliding and separating in our own directions, united only in the mandate to keep the outward appearances lovely.
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Camille Di Maio (The Memory of Us)
“
Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry,
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Isabel Allende (Maya’s Notebook: A Gritty Contemporary Mystery of Crime and Redemption in Latin America)
“
I was someone before I met Alexander Hamilton.
Not someone famous or important or with a learned philosophical understanding of all that was at stake in our revolution. Not a warrior or a philosopher or statesman.
But I was a patriot.
I was no unformed skein of wool for Hamilton to weave together into any tapestry he wished. That's important for me to remember now, when every thread of my life has become tangled with everything he was. Important, I think, in sorting out what can be forgiven, to remember my own experiences - the ones filled with my own yearnings that had nothing to do with him.
I was, long before he came into my life, a young woman struggling to understand her place in a changing world. And torn, even then, between loyalty, duty, and honor in the face of betrayal.
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Stephanie Dray (My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton)
“
The tapestry of the universe is vast and complex, with infinite patterns. While threads of tragedy may form the primary weave, humanity with its undaunted optimism still manages to embroider small designs of happiness and love.
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Brian Herbert (The Butlerian Jihad (Legends of Dune, #1))
“
I started to sway Lexi again when I realized she was quiet. Waiting. Both of us paused on the cusp of the unknown. I couldn't go backward or even retrace my own steps, let alone Xanda's. I could only go forward. The threads of time weren't unraveling but weaving into a tapestry -- a future, and a hope.
The only way to discover was to step into it.
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Holly Cupala (Tell Me a Secret)
“
Everything in my life unravels, thread by thread, yet I smile as if I'm weaving a masterpiece. I wait patiently for the day when all of it—my triumphs, my failures, even my name—dissolves into nothing, as if none of it ever mattered at all.
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Jonathan Harnisch (Second Alibi: The Banality of Life)
“
I pray that I am sufficiently stirred by the rumor of great things to seek the God who created this single thread that I am, and to marvel at a vision magnificent enough to cause this God to weave from this single thread a tapestry most resplendent.
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Craig D. Lounsbrough (An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus)
“
There is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is that you loved me: that all through those two and a half years during which the Fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our divided lives you really loved me.
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Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)
“
But fate is a funny thing. It weaves its threads through the loom with steady hands. At first, the result is seemingly a distorted mess, but if one can wait long enough, the full picture comes into focus, the threads tightly intertwined, strong and true.
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T.J. Klune (A Destiny of Dragons (Tales From Verania #2))
“
There is an old lady who lives on the moon. You can see her spinning thread on her spinning wheel. Her isolation and distance from the world has made her a sage. She weaves stories. She knows every wanderer who crosses the sea grass meadows, she knows every woman who uses her blackened blue hands to grind grain in the hand mill, she is friends with the little girl who got lost in the corn fields and was never found, and she knows the story of the boy who played flute on the little hill when his lambs slept. Grandmother said that if I had been a good girl the moon lady would weave for me a magical blanket and every stitch will be made from a moment of my life, a forgotten moment, a memory. Every stitch would be special. It would be made especially for me.
”
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Kanza Javed (Ashes, Wine and Dust)
“
I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world. They tiny elf-dancer became a wooden doll whose strings were jerked by people not paying attention. I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.
”
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Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)
“
Purposes are threads of continuity that we weave into the long-term view of our lives. Goals come and go, but purposes survive because they are long-term, they pertain to the why we exist part of our lives. They relate to how we perceive the theory of our lives.
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Patrick Morley (The Man in the Mirror: Solving the 24 Problems Men Face)
“
It is evident that while she was a devoted mother, she was always conducting her responsibilities as a mother with a sense of higher consciousness. It is almost like she is weaving the threads of her existence and those closest to her into the Web of Consciousness by her actions.
”
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Reena Kumarasingham (The Magdalene Lineage: Past Life Journeys Into the Sacred Feminine Mysteries)
“
Not everything that happens during the day is an omen portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas, #6))
“
He bit his fingernails. He bit his toenails. He pulled tiny green threads from his shirt and tried flossing his teeth. Then he tried making little green designs with tiny, tiny knots. Then he hit on the idea of weaving messages. Could he macramé "Help, I am a prisoner . . ." and plant it on the back of someone's jacket by static charge? If someone ever came back, that is? He got as far as a delicate gossamer H, E, L, caught the thread on a hangnail while rubbing his stubbled chin, and reduced his plea to an illegible green wad. He pulled another thread and started over.
”
”
Lois McMaster Bujold (The Vor Game (Vorkosigan Saga, #6))
“
All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined those dead, those living, those generations yet to come that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength to the very survival of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.
”
”
Dean Koontz (From the Corner of His Eye)
“
I closed my eyelids, and imagination, taking up the thread of thought, shot its swift shuttle back across the ages, weaving a picture on their blackness so real and vivid in its details that I could almost for a moment think that I had triumphed o'er the Past, and that my spirit's eyes had pierced the mystery of Time.
”
”
H. Rider Haggard
“
O woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their hearts. Poets are weaving for you a web with threads of golden imagery; painters are giving your form ever new immortality. The sea gives its pearls, the mines their gold, the summer gardens their flowers to deck you, to cover you, to make you more precious. The desire of men's hearts has shed its glory over your youth. You are one half woman and one half dream.
”
”
Rabindranath Tagore (The Gardener)
“
Silence is another element we find in classic fairy tales — girls muted by magic or sworn to silence in order to break enchantment. In "The Wild Swans," a princess is imprisoned by her stepmother, rolled in filth, then banished from home (as her older brothers had been before her). She goes in search of her missing brothers, discovers that they've been turned into swans, whereupon the young girl vows to find a way to break the spell. A mysterious woman comes to her in a dream and tells her what to do: 'Pick the nettles that grow in graveyards, crush and spin them into thread, then weave them into coats and throw them over your brothers' backs.' The nettles burn and blister, yet she never falters: picking, spinning, weaving, working with wounded, crippled hands, determined to save her brothers. All this time she's silent. 'You must not speak,' the dream woman has warned, 'for a single world will be like a knife plunged into your brothers' hearts.'
You must not speak. That's what my stepfather said: don't speak, don't cry, don't tell. That's what my mother said as well, as we sat in hospital waiting rooms -- and I obeyed, as did my brothers. We sat as still and silent as stone while my mother spun false tales to explain each break and bruise and burn. Our family moved just often enough that her stories were fresh and plausible; each new doctor believed her, and chided us children to be more careful. I never contradicted those tales. I wouldn't have dared, or wanted to. They'd send me into foster care. They'd send my young brothers away. And so we sat, and the unspoken truth was as sharp as the point of a knife.
”
”
Terri Windling (Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales)
“
I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being read as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and with the pattern finished.
”
”
Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit)
“
Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you. Each day the memories weigh a little heavier. Each day they drag you down that bit further. You wind them around you, a single thread at a time, and you weave your own shroud, you build a cocoon, and in it madness grows. You sit here with your yesterdays queuing at your shoulder. You listen to their reproach and curse those that gave you life. I know what you want. You want an end.
”
”
Mark Lawrence
“
It requires but a few threads of hope, for the heart that is skilled in the secret, to weave a web of happiness.
”
”
Sarah Josepha Hale
“
life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses.
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Isabel Allende (Maya's Notebook)
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Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything
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Agustina Bazterrica (Tender Is the Flesh)
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Unspun wool stands for the cosmic gas from which stars and galaxies are formed.
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Jessica Hemmings (Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today)
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Their story was their own, and there was none like it, before or since. But she also felt the thousands of other threads, the collective weaving together of all lives.
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Eleanor Shearer (River Sing Me Home)
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A HABIT IS A CABLE; WE WEAVE A THREAD EACH DAY, AND AT LAST WE CANNOT BREAK IT.” —Horace Mann
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Jack Canfield (The Power of Focus: How to Hit Your Business, Personal and Financial Targets with Confidence and Certainty)
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Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody's garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn't have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. "Technological change came from tinkerers," wrote Professor J.R. McNeill of Georgetown, "people with little or no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience." John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: "Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can't think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects." That's the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.
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Mark Steyn (After America: Get Ready for Armageddon)
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I spoke of disintegrating, dissolving into your surroundings. About atoms coming undone from each other, and being freed from yourself.
She was free.
She was free to float upward. There was nothing to stop her. She was floating up through the roof of the car, through the atmosphere, through the stratosphere, into the stars. Into outer space. Her atoms were intermingling with stardust. She was floating up here because this was where she belonged. Her atoms were weaving like thread into the fabric of the universe. Together, they formed a tapestry - a great, infinite tapestry - of stars and nebulae, of death and darkness, of life and creation. Swirling together. Endless.
She was the universe.
And the universe accepted her.
”
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Preston Norton (Where I End and You Begin)
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And just like that,the cloth was torn. was it the days, weeks of the same argument was it the months without affection, or was it simply the year and a half wasted on empty promises from both sides?I don't know what ripped it, but here I sit with my needle and thread trying to fix it knowing it will never look as beautiful as it did when we first started weaving it.
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Brittany Swanson
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She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her life, and weaves them gratefully into a single cloth— it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall and clears it for a different celebration
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Anita Barrows (A Year with Rilke)
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It’s going to be okay,” Noam said from over his shoulder. His hand caught Dara’s, their bodies pressed together by the mob. Dara turned to look at him—and for a moment it was like nothing else existed. He tipped his face forward and rested his brow against Noam’s. He focused on Noam’s eyes, on the little threads of gold weaving through Noam’s irises like striations in marble.
“I’m scared,” Dara admitted, softly enough he couldn’t even hear himself say it.
But Noam must have, because he curved an arm around Dara’s waist and drew him in, burying his own face against Dara’s hair. “Me too.
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Victoria Lee (The Electric Heir (Feverwake, #2))
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The stars are spinning their threads,
And the clouds are the dust that flies,
And the suns are weaving them up
For the time when the sleepers shall rise.
The ocean in music rolls,
And gems are turning to eyes,
And the trees are gathering souls
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.
The weepers are learning to smile,
And laughter to glean the sighs;
Burn and bury the care and guile,
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.
Oh, the dews and the moths and the daisy red,
The larks and the glimmers and flows!
The lilies and sparrows and daily bread,
And the something that nobody knows!
”
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George MacDonald (The Princess and Curdie (Princess Irene and Curdie, #2))
“
A Draft of Shadows'
desire turns us into ghosts.
We are vines of air on trees of wind,
a cape of flames
invented and devoured by flame.
The crack in the tree trunk:
sex, seal, serpentine passage
closed to the sun and to my eyes,
open to the ants.
That crack was the portico
of the furthest reaches of the seen and thought:
—there, inside, tides are green,
blood is green, fire green,
green stars burn in the black grass:
the green music of elytra
in the fig tree's pristine night;
—there, inside, fingertips are eyes,
to touch is to see, glances touch,
eyes hear smells;
—there, inside is outside,
it is everywhere and nowhere,
things are themselves and others,
imprisoned in an icosahedron
there is a music weaver beetle
and another insect unweaving
the syllogisms the spider weaves,
hanging from the threads of the moon;
—there, inside, space
is an open hand, a mind
that thinks shapes, not ideas,
shapes that breathe, walk, speak, transform
and silently evaporate;
—there, inside, land of woven echoes,
a slow cascade of light drops
between the lips of the crannies:
light is water; water, diaphanous time
where eyes wash their images;
—there, inside, cables of desire
”
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Octavio Paz (A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems)
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You do not set a high enough value on yourself if you think a man who loves you should not weave you into the fabric of his life with every thread. — Robert Service to Constance MacLean, 1903 (age 28)
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David Eso (Where the Nights Are Twice as Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets)
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Beginnings are fragile things. They're made of gossamer threads of hope and shimmer with the faint light of potential grace. It's in the human heart that we begin weaving our designs and dreams of experience yet to come. We live our entire lives within chrysalises. As soon as we emerge from one, life sculpts another around us. Within manifest reality, everything is in a constant state of becoming, even God.
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Dana Hutton (The Art of Becoming: Creating Abiding Fulfillment in an Unfulfilled World)
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The loom does not stop weaving because a single thread feels strain,” hissed the crone. Her voice came from somewhere overhead, clear and strong. “The arrow of time flies swift. The hour draws near. Subtlety is a luxury that can no longer be afforded. The ancient ways and ancient drives and ancient pains draw nearer by the hour. And this young thing must be readied for them—or broken, and another weapon chosen.
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Jim Butcher (Twelve Months (The Dresden Files, #18))
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I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.
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Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
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The essence of Christian faith has come to us in story form, the story of a God who will go to any lengths to get his family back. The Bible tells of flawed people -- people just like me -- who make shockingly bad choices and yet still find themselves pursued by God. As they receive grace and forgiveness, naturally they want to give it to others, and a thread of hope and transformation weaves its way throughout the Bible's accounts.
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Philip Yancey (Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?)
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Perhaps I should admit on the title page that this book is "By L. Frank Baum and his correspondents," for I have used many suggestions conveyed to me in letters from children. Once on a time I really imagined myself "an author of fairy tales," but now I am merely an editor or private secretary for a host of youngsters whose ideas I am requested to weave into the thread of my stories...My, what imaginations these children have developed! Sometimes I am fairly astounded by their daring an genius. There will be no lack of fairy-tale authors in the future, I am sure. My readers have told me what to do with Dorothy, and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, and I have obeyed their mandates. They have also given me a variety of subjects to write about in the future: enough, in fact, to keep me busy for some time. I am very proud of this alliance. Children love these stories because children have helped to create them. My readers know what they want and realize I try to please them. The result is satisfactory to the publishers, to me, and (I am quite sure) to the children. I hope, my dears, it will be a long time before we are obliged to dissolve partnership.
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L. Frank Baum (The Emerald City of Oz (Oz, #6))
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The true nature of the world is veiled, and if you shine a bright light on it, you can’t expose that truth; it melts away with the shadows in which it was cloaked. The truth is too awesome for us to stare directly at it, and we are meant to glimpse it only at the periphery of our vision. If the landscape of your mind is too dark with fear or doubt or anger, you are blind to all truth. But if your mental landscape is too bright with certitude and arrogance, you are snow-blind and likewise unable to see what lies before you. Only the moonlit mind allows wonder, and it is in the thrall of wonder that you can see the intricate weave of the world of which you are but one thread, one fantastic and essential thread.
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Dean Koontz (The Moonlit Mind (Pendleton, #0.5))
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...the best conclusion I was able to reach was that what we instinctively call imagination is in reality nothing less than the symbolic knowledge of that secret thread which weaves itself through our life knotted fast in all its windings, and without which we would surely be lost. But with this knowledge I realised too that this secret power also rules over us, for these same threads can be forcibly torn apart and leave us at the mercy of the dark fiend who is always ready to claim us as his own.
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E.T.A. Hoffmann
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I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.
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Jack London (The Star Rover (Modern Library Classics))
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at that point when friends and loved ones began to pass away ever more frequently. The essential loneliness that was a key thread in the weave of life, which everyone strove not to think about, now became a truth that she could no longer avoid considering.
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Dean Koontz (The Other Emily)
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Usually our minds are full of things that we are afraid will defile the purity of our actions. We have this impression of our minds being like a river and we feel like it's too polluted, we beat ourselves up over the fear that the mind pollution is going to spill over into our actions. This specific type of fear causes self-consciousness and self-doubt. The root of all this is the unawareness that we are, in reality, living and acting through our hearts and not through our minds. It is not from the mind that our bodies move and not through the mind that our hands choose who to touch, whom to hold onto and what to catch in midair. None of it is the mind. It is all the heart. And the heart cannot ever become polluted, not for a second. The heart can be torn, it can bleed, it can stop sometimes and it can even die. But it can never, it will never ever become polluted. You are your heart: the way you move, the way you love, the way you reach out to touch someone. By the contents of the heart the hands choose which threads to weave and which nails to hammer or to yank asunder. You need not fear. You are pure.
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C. JoyBell C.
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Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth. The breadth of Creation makes it impossible for us to step back far enough to see the story that the tapestry tells; the intricacy of it, from the macro to the micro to the subatomic, make sit impossible for us to comprehend the megatrillions of connections between the threads in just one small fragment of the whole.
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Dean Koontz (Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas, #6))
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Not everything that happens during the day is an omen portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth. The breadth of Creation makes it impossible for us to step back far enough to see the story that the tapestry tells; the intricacy of it, from the macro to the micro to the subatomic, makes it impossible for us to comprehend the megatrillions of connections between the threads in just one small fragment of the whole.
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Dean Koontz (Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas, #6))
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Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass.
She says she doesn’t deprive herself,
but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork.
In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate.
I’ve realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it.
I wonder what she does when I’m not there to do so.
Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it’s proportional.
As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast.
She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she’s “crazy about fruit."
It was the same with his parents;
as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, rotund stomach
and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking
making space for the entrance of men into their lives
not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave.
I have been taught accommodation.
My brother never thinks before he speaks.
I have been taught to filter.
“How can anyone have a relationship to food?" He asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs.
I want to tell say: we come from difference, Jonas,
you have been taught to grow out
I have been taught to grow in
you learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much
I learned to absorb
I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself
I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters
and I never meant to replicate her, but
spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits
that’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades.
We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit
weaving silence in between the threads
which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house,
skin itching,
picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again,
Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled.
Deciding how many bites is too many
How much space she deserves to occupy.
Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her,
And I don’t want to do either anymore
but the burden of this house has followed me across the country
I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry".
I don’t know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza
a circular obsession I never wanted but
inheritance is accidental
still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.
”
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Lily Myers
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He trusted that they would be enabled to further the progress already made in rebuilding the domestic stability and economic strength of the United Kingdom and in weaving still more closely the threads which bound together the countries of the Commonwealth, or, as he still preferred to call it, the Empire.’183
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Andrew Roberts (Churchill: Walking with Destiny)
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REVIEW: Like a master artisan, Weisberger weaves together threads of anthropology, botany, ecology and psychology in an inspiring tapestry of ideas sure to keep discerning readers warm and hopeful in these cold and desolate times.Unlike other texts, which ordinarily prescribe structural (ie. social, political, economic) solutions to the global crisis of environmental destruction, Rainforest Medicine hones in on the root cause of Western schizophrenia: spiritual poverty, and the resultant alienation of the individual from his environment. This incisive perception is married to a message of hope: that the keys to the door leading to promising new human vistas are held in the humblest of hands; those of the spiritual masters of the Amazon and the traditional cultures from which they hail. By illumining the ancient practices of authentic indigenous Amazonian shamanism, Weisberger supplies us with a manual for conservation of both the rainforest and the soul. And frankly, it could not have arrived at a better time.
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Jonathon Miller Weisberger (Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon)
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It seemed as if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the fiery haze without, she tried to discover what kind of woof Old Time, that greatest and longest-established Spinner of all, would weave from the threads he had already spun into a woman. But, his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.
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Charles Dickens (Hard Times)
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You are a woman. You cannot understand loyalty to the father.” They were wrong, as always. She understands Justice, the ancient spirit that lives inside each of them, ready to burst forth for every crime. It is a web, each thread stained with the blood of mothers and fathers, daughters and sons. It grows and grows, the Furies always weaving more traps.
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Costanza Casati (Clytemnestra)
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Fabric" and "fabricate "share a common Latin root: fabrica "something skillfully produced". Text and textile are similarly related, from the verb texere, "to weave", which in turn derives...from the Indo-European word *teḱs̱ , meaning "to weave". "Order" comes from the Latin word for setting the warp threads, [ordinare], as does the French word for computer, ordinateur. The French word metier, meaning "trade" or "craft" is also the word for "loom".
Such associations aren't uniquely European. In the K'iche' Mayan language, the terms for weaving designs and writing hieroglyphics both use the root tz'ibia. The Sanskrit word sutra, which now refers to a literary aphorism or religious scripture, originally denoted "string" or "thread". The word tantra which refers to a Hindu or Buddhist religious text, is from the Sanskrit tantrum, meaning "warp" or "loom". The Chinese word Zǔzhī” 组织 meaning "organization" or "arrange" is also the word for "weave", while Chéngjiù 成就 meaning "achievement" or "result" originally meant "twisting fibers together".
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Virginia Postrel (The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World)
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There’s still time,” Charlie breathed. He drummed his fingers on the table.
Sigil looked at him sidelong, scoffing. “And how do you know that?”
The priest shrugged, settling back in his chair. He interlaced his hands over his belly, like a man satisfied with a good meal. “The Spindles hold up the realms. We aren’t dead yet, so that’s something.”
“That’s something,” Sigil echoed, shaking her head.
We aren’t dead yet. Corayne almost laughed, and the many long days of travel and toil seemed to crash all at once, a terrible wave. The sea serpents, the horses, the oasis town filled with nothing but ghosts now. We aren’t dead yet, she thought. Weave that into a tapestry, for it seems to be the core thread of this journey.
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Victoria Aveyard (Blade Breaker (Realm Breaker, #2))
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Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it.
"The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child.
"'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs.
"The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind.
"That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love.
"In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life....
"The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun.
Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees:
There was a child went forth every day
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became...
The early lilacs became part of this child...
And the song of the phoebe-bird...
In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.
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Jay Griffiths (A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World)
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We both learned how to be a friend by watching the women who came before us. Women who taught us that it's okay to show someone who you really are-that when you stop hiding behind a mask of perfection and protection, you unlock something beautiful.... Our girlfriends weave a luminous thread from the women we are to the women we hope to become, We may never find perfection, but we'll never be alone.
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Melanie Shankle (Nobody's Cuter than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship)
“
I have, however, been at no pains to separate my own beliefs from those of the peasantry, but have rather let my men and women, dhouls and faeries, go their way unoffended or defended by any argument of mine. The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me. Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little. 1893.
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W.B. Yeats (The Celtic Twilight)
“
The Wheel of Time weaves the Pattern of the Ages, and lives are the threads it weaves. No one can tell how the thread of his own life will be woven into the Pattern, or how the thread of a people will be woven. It gave us the Breaking of the World, and the Exile, and Stone, and the Longing, and eventually it gave us back the stedding before we all died. Sometimes I think the reason you humans are the way you are is because your threads are so short.
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Robert Jordan (The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, #1))
“
To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life — that complex design I had been weaving since birth with all its dark threads, its unexplainable symbols set against a conventional background of domestic white and schoolboy blue, all those tangled strands which required the dexterity of a virtuoso to keep flowing — I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap! bitten off in an instant...
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John Knowles (A Separate Peace)
“
I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others' paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.
A thread now most often means a line of conversation via e-mail or other electronic means, but thread must have been an even more compelling metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women's work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of fiber into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale.
Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words becoming stories. The fairy-tale heroines spin cobwebs, straw, nettles into whatever is necessary to survive. Scheherazade forestalls her death by telling a story that is like a thread that cannot be cut; she keeps spinning and spinning, incorporating new fragments, characters, incidents, into her unbroken, unbreakable narrative thread. Penelope at the other end of the treasury of stories prevents her wedding to any one of her suitors by unweaving at night what she weaves by day on her father-in-law's funeral garment. By spinning, weaving, and unraveling, these women master time itself, and though master is a masculine word, this mastery is feminine.
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Rebecca Solnit
“
When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson."
"In the nights though, I couldn't help but weave the golden cloth of my dreams. Each stitch from heart to thought, and thought to heart, was painful to bear, even if it was joyous at times. Because each thread was fraught with the fears of being broken midway, lost and never found again.
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Faiqa Mansab (This House of Clay and Water)
“
You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with
his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent
bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on
the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean
spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?
I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its
jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.
I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.
”
”
Pablo Neruda
“
HAVE YOU EVER sailed in a longship? Not a stubby, robust knörr laden with trade goods and wallowing like a packhorse across the sea, but a sleek, deathly quick, terror-stirring thing – a dragon ship. Have you ever stood at the bow with the salt wind whipping your hair as Rán’s white-haired daughters cream beneath the beast’s strong, curving chest? Have you travelled the whale road with wind-burnt warriors whose rare skill with axe and sword is a gift from mighty Óðin, Lord of War? Men whose death work feeds the wolf and the eagle and the raven? I have done all this. It has been my life and though it would make those skirt-wearing White Christ followers sick with disgust (and fear, I shouldn’t wonder) I have been happy with my lot. For some men are born closer to the gods than others. By the well of Urd, beneath one of the roots of the great life tree Yggdrasil, the Norns, those sisters of fate, of present and future, take the threads of men’s lives and weave them into patterns full of pain and suffering, glory and riches, and death. And their ancient fingers must have tired at the spinning of my life.
”
”
Giles Kristian (Sons of Thunder (Raven, #2))
“
Winter war was the ruin of the pattern.
Near the beginning of a new weave, if she felt a flaw through her hands—the hitch in the flow, a tension on the loom as she threaded the shuttle through the warp—she could stop and unpick one row: a moment, a blink, and it was mended. But if she ignored it, if she pretended it was nothing, she would begin to feel each pass of the shuttle, each beat of the weft turn more wrong, until she slowed, closed her eyes, and stopped. Then she must tally the time it would take to undo the weave, and weigh that against the rest of the work to be done.
”
”
Nicola Griffith (Menewood (The Hild Sequence #2))
“
Life is about surprises. Sometimes filling us with unexpected joy and, at other times, inviting us to face them. With all their might, reverence, and astonishing forces of nature, dancing to their rhythm, cycle, and flight. Weaving. Weaving their threads into our human life. And within their flow, we humans can only stand breathless before their magnificent force. Washing us away from one self to another, taking us through whirlpools and whirlwinds, spitting us out on new shores, never to return. Inviting us to awake and live our lives with attentiveness to the truth that walks in our hearts. To live our life by choice.
”
”
Efrat Shokef Ph.D.
“
Through the archway, and up the hill, I feel it surging, and drop to my knees. A string of black smoke wafts out of my mouth, as a long slender form starts to crawl out of my gaping maw. My eyes water as it slides and pulls and slowly works its way out of me, trying not to bite down, struggling to breathe. And in the glow of the moon the serpent finally weaves its muscled form out of me, a diamond pattern running down its length, crisscrossed threads of silver, a flicker of its tongue, and an angry hiss permeating the night. As it slithers into the underbrush—ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet long—the last of it to disappear are three razor sharp needles sticking out of its tail. (End of Chapter Two.)
”
”
Richard Thomas (Incarnate: A Novel)
“
Oh my heart, sing of the gardens which you have never known!
Those which are frozen in glass, clear, unreachable.
Water and roses of Isfahan, or Shiraz,
Give blessed song, give praise equal to none.
Oh my heart, give evidence that they have not spared you,
And that it is you who are intended, and it is for you that they ripen their figs.
That it is you who ply between their blossoming boughs,
Like a face, in the rousing winds.
Avoid the mistake of imagining some deprivation,
For the decision has been taken: to be!
Silk thread, weave your way into the fabric!
Whatever the image with which you have become one
(even if it be but a moment from a life of pain),
Feel that the whole carpet, so worthy of praise, is intended!
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus)
“
Ione
II.
'TWAS in the radiant summer weather,
When God looked, smiling, from the sky;
And we went wand'ring much together
By wood and lane, Ione and I,
Attracted by the subtle tie
Of common thoughts and common tastes,
Of eyes whose vision saw the same,
And freely granted beauty's claim
Where others found but worthless wastes.
We paused to hear the far bells ringing
Across the distance, sweet and clear.
We listened to the wild bird's singing
The song he meant for his mate's ear,
And deemed our chance to do so dear.
We loved to watch the warrior Sun,
With flaming shield and flaunting crest,
Go striding down the gory West,
When Day's long fight was fought and won.
And life became a different story;
Where'er I looked, I saw new light.
Earth's self assumed a greater glory,
Mine eyes were cleared to fuller sight.
Then first I saw the need and might
Of that fair band, the singing throng,
Who, gifted with the skill divine,
Take up the threads of life, spun fine,
And weave them into soulful song.
They sung for me, whose passion pressing
My soul, found vent in song nor line.
They bore the burden of expressing
All that I felt, with art's design,
And every word of theirs was mine.
I read them to Ione, ofttimes,
By hill and shore, beneath fair skies,
And she looked deeply in mine eyes,
And knew my love spoke through their rhymes.
Her life was like the stream that floweth,
And mine was like the waiting sea;
Her love was like the flower that bloweth,
And mine was like the searching bee —
I found her sweetness all for me.
God plied him in the mint of time,
And coined for us a golden day,
And rolled it ringing down life's way
With love's sweet music in its chime.
And God unclasped the Book of Ages,
And laid it open to our sight;
Upon the dimness of its pages,
So long consigned to rayless night,
He shed the glory of his light.
We read them well, we read them long,
And ever thrilling did we see
That love ruled all humanity, —
The master passion, pure and strong.
”
”
Paul Laurence Dunbar
“
Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me)
“
Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they were traveling, but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he could almost believe they were hardly moving at all. Then a tiny glow of light appeared in the far distance and within seconds had grown so much in size that Arthur realized it was traveling toward them at a colossal speed, and he tried to make out what sort of craft it might be. He peered at it, but was unable to discern any clear shape, and suddenly gasped in alarm as the aircar dipped sharply and headed downward in what seemed certain to be a collision course. Their relative velocity seemed unbelievable, and Arthur had hardly time to draw breath before it was all over. The next thing he was aware of was an insane silver blur that seemed to surround him. He twisted his head sharply round and saw a small black point dwindling rapidly in the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to realize what had happened. They had plunged into a tunnel in the ground. The colossal speed had been their own, relative to the glow of light which was a stationary hole in the ground, the mouth of the tunnel. The insane blur of silver was the circular wall of the tunnel down which they were shooting, apparently at several hundred miles an hour. He closed his eyes in terror. After a length of time which he made no attempt to judge, he sensed a slight subsidence in their speed and some while later became aware that they were gradually gliding to a gentle halt. He opened his eyes again. They were still in the silver tunnel, threading and weaving their way through what appeared to be a crisscross warren of converging tunnels. When they finally stopped it was in a small chamber of curved steel. Several tunnels also had their termini here, and at the farther end of the chamber Arthur could see a large circle of dim irritating light. It was irritating because it played tricks with the eyes, it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultraviolet. Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old eyes. “Earthman,” he said, “we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea.
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1))
“
Throw the offerings!"
Agnes and her husband had returned--- I could just make them out, clambering unsteadily down the hillside with their lanterns raised. In an act of ill-advised and entirely undeserved kindness, they had gathered up a handful of villagers to ride to the rescue of the idiot scholars who had tangled with the most fearsome of the local Folk, despite their warnings. A strangled sound escaped me, something between a sob and laugh.
"Get back!" Eichorn shouted at the villagers. Rose was clambering to his feet, wheezing, for the fauns had released him to snatch at the "offerings" tossed their way by the villagers. I would have expected bloody hunks of meat, but instead, ludicrously, they seemed to be throwing vegetables--- carrots and onions, predominantly.
How did it happen? The scene is a blur of noise and movement, to my memory. I believe I was laughing at the time--- yes, laughing. The image of those nightmarish beasts appeased by a hail of carrots was too much for my frayed composure, and for a moment it seemed this would become another story I told at conferences or to rouse a laugh from my students. For the Folk are terrible indeed, monsters or tyrants or both, but are they not also ridiculous? Whether they be violent beasts distracted by vegetables, or creatures powerful enough to spin straw into gold, which they will happily exchange for a simple necklace, or a great king overthrown by his own cloak, there is a thread of the absurd weaving through all faerie stories, to which the Folk themselves are utterly oblivious.
”
”
Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde, #2))