Great Threads Quotes & Sayings

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably. — Jodi Picoult

160Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance. — Immanuel Kant

Like threads of old spider webs, still sticky and hovering, the past waits for us to submit, or depart. When I least expect it, a memory comes skittering out of the dark, spinning and netting the air, ready to snap me up and ensnare me in old and complex puzzles. Just a glimpse of a worn-out patchwork quilt and the old question comes thudding out of the night again like a great moth. Why did my mother not return? After all these years, I find myself wondering, but with the dullness of expecting no response. — Joy Kogawa

This crisis didn't have to happen. America had a boom-and-bust cycle from the 1790s to the 1930s, with a financial panic every ten to fifteen years. But we figured out how to fix it. Coming out of the Great Depression, the country put tough rules in place that gave us fifty years without a financial crisis. But in the 1980s, we started pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric, and we found ourselves back in the boom-and-bust cycle. When this crisis is over, there will be a once-in-a-generation chance to rewrite the rules. What we set in place will determine whether our country continues down this path toward a boom-and-bust economy or whether we reestablish an economy with more stability that gives ordinary folks a chance at real prosperity. — Elizabeth Warren

Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky,
And in midst of prosperity, know thou may'st die.
While the great Loom of God works in darkness above,
And our trials here below are but threads of His Love. — Thomas Pynchon

I think all writers are always collecting characters as we go along. Not just characters of course, we're collecting EVERYTHING. Bits and pieces of story. An interesting dynamic between people. A theme. A great character back story. A cool occupation. The look of someone's eyes. A burning ambition. Hundreds of thousands of bits of flotsam and jetsam that we stick in the back of our minds like the shelves full of buttons and ribbons and fabrics and threads and beads in a costumer's shop. — Alexandra Sokoloff

He wove those three threads into a talk ranging from annually spending a week at Halloween as a child collecting candy to giving candy to hundreds of children at Halloween as an adult; from childhood assistance he received from adults, particularly after his parents divorced, to saying I challenge you to be a caring adult in someone's life ... Great times call forth great leaders. — Thomas Jefferson

Her mind was still tiptoeing along the boundary of consciousness, in that state of semi-waking that spins threads between dream and real, and for a moment she felt herself to be a girl who has come down off a porch to confront a great darkness with a tiny light. — Laini Taylor

The morning arrived the way Alice imagined a whisper would: in tendrils of gray and threads of gold, quietly, quietly. The sky was illuminated with great care and deliberation, and she leaned back to watch it bloom. — Tahereh Mafi

The canvases which Mr. St. Jones referred to with a paintbrush that was long and slightly bowed: for the most part interiors, or undergrounds, of pocked and craggy holes, rock vaults with mossy floors and slimy walls, or narrow scenic vistas that skinny silver streams squirmed through like sidewinders flipped on their backs, beneath downward grasping tentacles of roots, stalactites dagger-sharp and dangling by threads of stone, stalagmites teetering, all doused, frozen in molten electric white that suggested what a glimpse of hell might be, too beautiful, some still lifes too, great bulbous beets, hoary legumes, giant scallions, white carrots, tomatoes, berries, squash in huge radiant bowls, and portraits, signed by Ionia, of shadows, from which gleamed eyes and teeth and nails and, here and there, a glowing bubble, or scrotum, caught the eye. Near the door a counter clacked but rather quietly. — Douglas Woolf

Within that quiet little girl with no apparent needs lived a person with a great imagination. In that shell I lived and grew and planned, until there emerged a way to pull all the loose threads of my life together. — A.R. Cecil

You have threads of life blowing around, possibly even strangling you - threads that are meant to bind together and become your unique, God-given contribution to a world in great need. — Jennie Allen

The planetary cycles are thus the threads of eternity which weave the great tapestry of life in time". — Pam Gregory

When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed. — Leo Tolstoy

In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone. — Alice Walker

The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her 'i want to live' was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything
love, convictions, faith, history
no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter. — Milan Kundera

If the way to the center were easy to find - if it were capable of being captured in doctrines or were subject to human control - it would not be the genuine way. If the path that opens the heart and the mind could be found by simple belief, all the true believers would be opening the doors and windows of their hearts with gestures of true compassion. They would readily understand the common threads in the words "Jesus was right," "Moses led me along," and "Mohammed opened doors in my heart." When the great way opens even for a moment the path between mind and heart widens. The heart begins to find the thought of unity buried within it and the mind begins to see subtleties that were impossible to grasp just a minute before. Finding the great way requires a willingness to surrender again and again, not simply a zeal for bowing one's head in the same old way. — Michael Meade

I had a great grandmother who believed in so many strange superstitions. She used to tell the future from the things that catch on to the hem of your skirt when you've been sewing, and different colored threads would mean different things ... Of course, all that influenced me quite a lot as a child. — Joanne Harris

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. — Stephen Lee

Speech does not always unravel matters. Words can betray you, their labyrinthine threads tangled in knots, for we were cursed at that great tower of Babel, to speak always in riddles and never yet to comprehend. — Ned Hayes

A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little threads has no time to philosophize about it, but rather he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn't think but acts, and he feels how things must go more than he can explain it. — Vincent Van Gogh

Sports was a great equalizer. It didn't have color. It didn't matter whether you were rich or poor, black or white. It really shaped me in many ways to be able to deal with a lot of different personalities and different cultures. Sports were the common thread. — Howard Schultz

One of the purest souls ever to live on this fallen planet was Nicholas Herman, known as Brother Lawrence. He wrote very little, but what he wrote has seemed to several generations of Christians to be so rare and so beautiful as to deserve a place near the top among the world's great books of devotion. The writings of Brother Lawrence are the ultimate in simplicity; ideas woven like costly threads to make a pattern of great beauty. — A.W. Tozer

Because 98 percent of our ideas are not great ideas, or everyone would be a billionaire. So yeah. That's something people have had a lot of experience in: being told our idea is bad or our performance is bad. I think that's the one common thread between all working actors is that they have a pretty thick skin - or you'd like to hope. You're used to rejection, that's for sure. — Dax Shepard

There are those who hold that there is a pattern to all that is said and done in this world, that no thing happens without reason nor out of time. As to that, I cannot speak, for I have seen too many threads cut short to believe it, but of a surety, I have seen too the weft of my fate shuttled on the loom. If there is a pattern, I do not think there is anyone among us who can stand at a great enough distance to discern it; yet I will not say that it is not so. — Jacqueline Carey

If we accept that we are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all cultures share the same genius. And whether that genius is placed into technological wizardry which has been our great achievement, or, by contrast, placed into the unraveling of complex threads of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice. — Wade Davis

You think you know. Then you lower your guard and act as though everything's just great. With the passage of time, you stop paying as much attention to things as you should. You're confident. What more can you do? Life is smiling on you. So is luck. You can afford your dreams. Everything's fine, everything blesses you ... and then, without warning, the sky falls in on your head. And once you're flat on your back, you realize that your life, your whole life - with its ups and downs, its pains and pleasures, its promises and failures, hangs and has always hung by a thread as flimsy and imperceptible as the threads in a spider's web. Suddenly, the slightest sound terrifies you, and no longer feel like believing in anything whatsoever. All you want to do is close your eyes and think no more — Yasmina Khadra

In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God. — Albert Camus

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 Summer was in her gaze.'
Heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head,
You'd know the folly of being comforted! — W.B.Yeats

The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries - a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man. — Gerald Durrell