
“Inside every widow there's a spider that weaves it's webs in the corners of her heart.”
"Voices Within the Ark", ibid.
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 37, “Jiriki’s Hunt” (p. 619).
“Inside every widow there's a spider that weaves it's webs in the corners of her heart.”
"Voices Within the Ark", ibid.
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, pp. 43-44
Context: Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
“Trust to God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.”
As quoted in The Way To Win : Showing How To Succeed In Life (1887) by John Thomas Dale, p. 89
Context: I record the conviction that in one way or another, special individual help is given to every creature to endure to the end. It has been my own experience, that always when suffering, whether mental or bodily, approached the point where further endurance appeared impossible, the pulse of it began to ebb and a lull ensued.
You are tender-hearted, and you want to be true, and are trying to be; learn these two things: Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand. Do not be in a hurry, but be diligent. Enter into the sublime patience of the Lord. Trust to God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet. When God's people are able and willing thus to labor and wait, remember that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day; the grand harvest of the ages shall come to its reaping, and the day shall broaden itself to a thousand years, and the thousand years shall show themselves as a perfect and finished day.
The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)
Original Sin
Song lyrics, Songs from the West Coast (2001)
1941 - 1967
Source: 'Portrait: Edward Hopper', Brian O'Doherty, 'Art in America', 1952 (December 1964), p. 73
The Immortality of the Soul (c. 1594). Compare:
:"Our souls sit close and silently within / And their own webs from their own entrails spin; / And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such / That, spider-like, we feel the tenderest touch." John Dryden, Mariage à la Mode, act ii. sc. 1.;
:"The spider’s touch—how exquisitely fine!— / Feels at each thread, and lives along the line." Alexander Pope, Epistle i. line 217.