Source: "The House of Mirth" http://books.google.com/books?id=plFdLlYHwZ8C&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=No+insect+hangs+its+nest+on+threads+as+frail+as+those+which+will+sustain+the+weight+of+human+vanity.&source=bl&ots=j0EPPhjIZW&sig=MQMjyNy5yKK97Ok4bGqRWfC3obE&hl=en&ei=T5F0TMqyMIuisAOczpyMBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=No%20insect%20hangs%20its%20nest%20on%20threads%20as%20frail%20as%20those%20which%20will%20sustain%20the%20weight%20of%20human%20vanity.&f=false (1905), ch. X, pg. 69
“Winter garden,
the moon thinned to a thread,
insects singing.”
A Summer Evening’s Tale
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)
“I hang by a thread, but it is (if I may so speak) of Christ's spinning”
Letter 56 to Lady Kenmure
Letters of Samuel Rutherford (Andrew Bonar)
Book 5, Chapter 6 (p. 442)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)
Conversation between Wentworth and Timothy Carrier
Chapter 63, p. 368
The Good Guy (2007)
“I hardly sustain myself beneath the weight of white men's blood that I have shed.”
Recorded by the Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet after a council with Sitting Bull on June 19, 1868. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 79-80.
Context: I hardly sustain myself beneath the weight of white men's blood that I have shed. The whites provoked the war; their injustices, their indignities to our families, the cruel, unheard of and wholly unprovoked massacre at Fort Lyon … shook all the veins which bind and support me. I rose, tomahawk in hand, and I have done all the hurt to the whites that I could.
“How frail the human heart must be —
a mirrored pool of thought.”
Source: "I Thought I Could Not Be Hurt," quoted in the introduction to Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975) as Plath's first poem, written at age 14
