Thread and thrum

Atrios used to have those fine bits of poetry, threadbare from overuse. "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," etc. Now he just says ‘yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.’ What with timezones, that’s all I ever see at the top of the page when I visit. Let’s see if memory and google can do better.

William Shakespeare (who likes the word ‘thread’ quite well):

O monstrous arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread,
thou thimble,
Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail!
Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou!
Braved in mine own house with a skein of thread?

Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,
Charm ache with air and agony with words:

The church! where is it? Had not churchmen pray’d,
His thread of life had not so soon decay’d:

And if thou want’st a cord, the smallest thread
That ever spider twisted from her womb
Will serve to strangle thee.

Cut thread and thrum;
Quail, crush, conclude, and quell!

Any silk, any thread,
Any toys for your head.

And all the shrouds wherewith my life should sail
Are turned to one thread,

‘Tis almost morning; I would have thee gone:
And yet no further than a wanton’s bird;
Who lets it hop a little from her hand,
Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves,
And with a silk thread plucks it back again,
So loving-jealous of his liberty.

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones

Nietzsche:

— For ye dislike to grope at a thread with cowardly hand; and where ye can divine, there do ye hate to calculate—

Kierkegaard:

… when nothing important ever happens to gather the threads of life together with the finality of a catastrophe: that is the time for talkativeness.

for, alas!, the secret of speculative understanding is precisely to sew without fastening the end and without knotting the thread, which is why it can wondrously keep on sewing and sewing, that is, pulling the thread through.

Emerson:

We can never surprise nature in a corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone.

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.

Fate keeps everything alive so long as the smallest thread of public necessity holds it on to the tree.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, or against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower’s bag.

Lawrence Sterne:

… his muscular strength and virility worn down to a thread; – his own animal spirits ruffled beyond description …

Vladimir Nabokov:

The third type is the so-called perry, possibly derived from periscope, despite the double r, or perhaps from parry in vague connection with foil as in fencing. But this does not matter much since anyway I invented the term myself many years ago. It denotes the lowest kind of author’s minion: the character or characters who, throughout the the book, or at least in certain parts of the book, are so to speak on duty; whose only purposes, whose only reason for being, is that they visit the places which the authors wishes the reader to visit and meet the characters whom the author wishes the reader to meet. In such chapters the perry has hardly an identity of his own. He has no will, no soul, no heart, nothing – he is a mere peregrinating perry although of course he can regain his identity in some other part of the book. The perry visits some household only because the author wants to describe the characters in that household. He is very helpful, the perry. Without the perry, a story is sometimes difficult to direct and propel; but better kill the story than have a perry drag its thread about like a lame insect dragging a dusty bit of cobweb.

A thread of subtle pain, Tugged at by playful death, released again.

King James Bible:

The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And there were liers in wait abiding in the chamber. And he brake them from off his arms like a thread.

That I will not take from a thread even to a shoelatchet.

Feel free to add to the list.