Spider Silk Quotes & Sayings

It's like the spiders are sharing an ancient secret with me, and that's why I'm going to spend the rest of my life studying spider silk. — Cheryl Hayashi

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant.
Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by ... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony. — Mary Karr

Just like a spider with a line of silk! Did you ever see them throw themselves out into space to weave? They're taking a chance, every single time. They got to do it or else they'd never create anything. But I bet it don't feel good, even to a spider. — Olivia Goldsmith

To borrow from the writings of a spider named Charlotte: 'Silk is terrific!' — Cheryl Hayashi

For me, each day begins and ends with wanting to learn a little more about the secrets of spider silk. — Cheryl Hayashi

The real magic - the magic we'd lived with all our lives, my mother's magic of charms and cantrips, of salt by the door and a red silk sachet to placate the little gods - had turned sour on us that summer, somehow, like a spider that turns from good luck to bad at the stroke of midnight, spinning its web to catch our dreams. And for every little spell of charm, for every card dealt and every rune cast and every sign scratched against a doorway to divert the path of malchance, the wind just blew a little harder, tugging at our clothes, sniffing at us like a hungry dog, moving us here and moving us there. — Joanne Harris

Not a trace of emotion on her face. Not a flicker of a change in expression. Did she not care, or was she wearing an exceptional mask?
Funny, just how easily those masks came to people. Costumes were nothing in the grand scheme of things. Cloth or kevlar, spider silk or steel. It was the false faces we wore, the layers of defenses, the lies we told ourselves, that formed the real barriers between us and the hostile world around us. — Wildbow

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic. — Diane Setterfield

How easily life can end on a misunderstanding. How fragile we all are, like spider silk on a branch of thorns. I — Stacey Lee

She'd spun a web around Maggie's son without his knowing it, without even perhaps her intention. Spider silk was stronger than chain if you happened to be a fly. There — Lisa Unger

Biologically inspired materials could revolutionize materials science. People looking at spider silk and abalone shells are looking for new ways to make materials better, cheaper, and with less toxic byproducts. — Janine Benyus

It is with eight lengthy legs we use to catch food, balance and knit a beautiful silk bed,
but as babies we had lost our bones and skin, and hence our legs we had shed. — Jasmine Jean

... words have been all my life, all my life
this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out
the silk is her life, her home, her safety
her food and drink too
and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew ... . — A.S. Byatt

I pulled word after word from my core, like silk for a spider's web, spinning a make-believe life. That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones? - Minka (The Storyteller) — Jodi Picoult

Think how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things. We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation. While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water. — William Powers

On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web's creator to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnoid revenge. — John Connolly

Some spider silks are really strong, but not all of them are. The ones that are really strong can actually rival steel and approach the tensile strength of Kevlar. Thus far, the dragline silk seems to be the strongest. — Cheryl Hayashi