It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form.

If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.

To live is to be haunted.

The suspense: the fearful, acute suspense: of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety <i>to be doing something</i> to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what reflections of endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them!

... but life would be very miserable indeed were I to spend it in terror of the thing that has not yet happened.

I'll never be happy, how can you love me, I'm awful, I'm covered with spiders, I'm <i>doomed</i>.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.

A spider lives inside my head
Who weaves a strange and wondrous web
Of silken threads and silver strings
To catch all sorts of flying things,
Like crumbs of thoughts and bits of smiles
And specks of dried-up tears,
And dust of dreams that catch and cling
For years and years and years...

И жить торопится и чувствовать спешит. Кн. Вяземский.

The Arthashastra does not forget to warn the tyrant that he can never win. He may rise to eminence through ambition or the call of duty, but the more absolute his power, the more he is hated, and the more he is the prisoner of his own trap. The web catches the spider. He cannot wander at leisure in the streets and parks of his own capital, or sit on a lonely beach listening to the waves and watching the gulls. Through enslaving others he himself becomes the most miserable of slaves.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps?

[A] planet, wholly inhabited by spiders, (which is very possible)