Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
Richard Feynman
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Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist.
Juan Gris
A favourite saying in China—which she had heard on occasion from her own grandmother—was that the threads of life are easy to weave, but difficult to untangle.
Stephen R. Lawhead
Orgoch gave a most ungentle snort. Orddu, meanwhile, had unfolded a length of brightly woven tapestry and held it out to Taran.
“We came to bring you this, my duckling,” she said. “Take it and pay no heed to Orgoch’s grumbling. She’ll have to swallow her disappointment—for lack of anything better.”
“I have seen this on your loom,” Taran said, more than a little distrustful. “Why do you offer it to me? I do not ask for it, nor can I pay for it.”
“It is yours by right, my robin,” answered Orddu. “It does come from our loom, if you insist on strictest detail, but it was really you who wove it.”
Puzzled, Taran looked more closely at the fabric and saw it crowded with images of men and women, of warriors and battles, of birds and animals. “These,” he murmured in wonder, “these are of my own life.”
“Of course,” Orddu replied. “The pattern is of your choosing and always was.”
“My choosing?” Taran questioned. “Not yours? Yet I believed...” He stopped and raised his eyes to Orddu. “Yes,” he said slowly, “once I did believe the world went at your bidding. I see now it is not so. The strands of life are not woven by three hags or even by three beautiful damsels. The pattern indeed was mine. But here,” he added, frowning as he scanned the final portion of the fabric where the weaving broke off and the threads fell unraveled, “here it is unfinished.”
“Naturally,” said Orddu. “You must still choose the pattern, and so must each of you poor, perplexed fledglings, as long as thread remains to be woven.”Lloyd Alexander
The religions begin by assuring us that if we could see the full picture we would find it more integrated than we would normally suppose. Life gives us no view of the whole. [...] It is as if life were a great tapestry, which we face from its wrong side. This gives it the appearance of a maze of knots and threads, which for the most part appear chaotic.
From a purely human standpoint the wisdom traditions are the species' most prolonged and serious attempts to infer from the maze on this side of the tapestry the pattern which, on its right side, gives meaning to the whole. As the beauty and harmony of the design derive from the way its parts are related, the design confers on these parts a significance that we, seeing only scraps of the design, do not normally perceive.Huston Smith
In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature.
Carl Sagan
Feynman, Richard
Fforde, Jasper
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