Thread Quotes (page 8)
The most dangerous part of lending books lies in the returning. At such times, friendships hang by a thread. I look for agony, ecstasy, for tears, transfiguration, trembling hands, a broken voice - but what the borrower usually says is, "I enjoyed it." I enjoyed it - as if that were what books were for.
Anatole Broyard
I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy...
Shirley Jackson
Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!...Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it...and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!
Jack London
The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.
Roland Barthes
If you come as softly. As wind within the trees. You may hear what I hear. See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightly. As threading dew. I will take you gladly. Nor ask more of you. You may sit beside me. Silent as a breath. Only those who stay dead. Shall remember death. And if you come I will be silent. Nor speak harsh words to you. I will not ask you why, now. Or how, or what you do. We shall sit here, softly. Beneath two different years. And the rich earth between us. Shall drink our...
Audre Lorde
One that is ever kind said yesterday:'Your well-beloved's hair has threads of grey, And little shadows come about her eyes; Time can but make it easier to be wise. Though now it seems impossible, and so. All that you need is patience.'Heart cries, 'No, I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain. Time can but make her beauty over again: Because of that great nobleness of hers. The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs, Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways. When all the wild...
William Butler Yeats
Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once.
Anais Nin
Speak you too,
speak as the last,
say out your say.
Speak-
But don’t split off No from Yes.
Give your say this meaning too:
Give it the shadow.
Give it shadow enough,
Give it as much
As you know is spread round you from
Midnight to midday and midnight.
Look around:
See how things all come alive-
By death! Alive!
Speaks true who speaks shadow.
But now the place shrinks, where you stand:
Where now, shadow-stripped, where?
Climb. Grope upwards.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!
Finer:...
Paul Celan
The evening before I departed I stood on the rim of a lagoon on Isla Rabida. Flamingos rode on its dark surface like pink swans, apparently asleep. Small, curved feathers, shed from their breasts, drifted away from them over the water on a light breeze. I did not move for an hour. It was a moment of such peace, every troubled thread in a human spirit might have uncoiled and sorted itself into a graceful order. Other flamingos stood in the shallows with diffident elegance in the falling...
Barry Lopez