Gossamer

It was a simple gown, caught lightly at the waist by a gossamer thread.

A third with pins in her mouth was running about between the countess and Sónya, and a fourth held the whole of the gossamer garment up high on one uplifted hand.

A morning mist hung over the water, as thin as gossamer and the wisps of memory.

The postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dull distance.

Jessica felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their feet and hands–boulders or pea gravel or flaked rock or pea sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder.

When he withdrew it, some silvery substance came away, stretching from temple to wand like a thick gossamer strand, which broke as he pulled the wand away from it and fell gracefully into the Pensieve, where it swirled silvery white, neither gas nor liquid.

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shoreline indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, “the glassy surface of a lake.” When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another.

Unlike the bear, it appeared to be a totally artificial construction, a thing of metal, circuits, and yards (or maybe miles) of gossamer-thin wire.

And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Rue, who is dressed in a gossamer gown complete with wings, flutters her way to Caesar.

Is hardly thicker than the gossamer, Or poor Arachne’s silver tapestry—

A few bogies shoot past Hiro, already so spread out as to be nothing more than an annoyance, and splat into bystanders, wrapping them in sticky gossamer veils.

How serene does she now arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer!

“You complain then that you do not sense the gossamer waves of Time.

Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.