What are threads?

Famous quotes containing the word threads:

“All is waste and worthless, till
Arrives the selecting will,
And, out of slime and chaos, Wit
Draws the threads of fair and fit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

“Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions—tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?... If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece—must the whole web be rent in drawing them out?”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)

“Always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds
suspended on invisible threads above the Site,”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)