“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”
            Variant: How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. 
Source: Sister Carrie
        
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Theodore Dreiser 20
Novelist, journalist 1871–1945Related quotes
“So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.”
Source: A Study in Scarlet
1910s, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)
                                        
                                        A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Exploring with Wiki 
Context: My specific purpose for the first wiki was to create an environment where we might link together each other's experience to discover the pattern language of programming. I had previously worked with a HyperCard stack that was set up to achieve the same kind of goal. I knew people liked to read and author in that HyperCard stack, but it was single user.
                                    
“I mean, sure, like all prophecy the wording is vague.”
Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 2, “Possibilities and Myths” (p. 27)
“All songwriters are links in a chain.”
Interview with Paul Zollo in 1988 https://americansongwriter.com/2014/01/american-icons-pete-seeger/
                                
                                    “I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver”
                                
                                
                                
                                
                            
                                        
                                        Hérodiade. 
Hérodiade (1898) 
Context: I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver
And in solitary vigil
After flights triumphal
My head rise
From this scythe
Through a clean rupture
That serves to dissever
The ancient disharmony
With the body
As drunk from fasting
It persists in following
With a haggard bound
Its gaze profound
Up where the frozen
Absolute has chosen
That nothing shall measure
Its vastness, O glacier
But according to a ritual
Illumined by the principle
That chose my consecration
It extends a salutation.
                                    
                                
                                    “Soundlessly, shadow with shadow, we wrestled together,
Till the grey dawn.”
                                
                                
                                
                                
                            
"The Shadow" in The Empire Review (1923) Vol. 37, p. 620