"What I don't understand is how women can pour hot wax on their bodies, let it dry, then rip out every single hair by its root and still be scared of spiders. "
— Jerry Seinfeld

"We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps,
but still attached to life at all four corners."
— Virginia Woolf

"All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one..."
— Stephen King (The Dark Tower)

"The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there..."
— Stephen King

"This sick strange darkness comes creeping on so haunting everytime
And as I stared I counted the webs from all the spiders
catching things and eating their insides
Like indecision to call you
And hear your voice of treason
Will you come home and stop this pain tonight
stop this pain tonight"
— Blink 182

"Hang on tight, spider monkey!"
— Edward, The Twilight Movie

"’...You never read Spider-Man? Accepting your true identity means understanding that you are a stranger to this world. A freak, ostracized by the very people you want to help.’"
— Ted Dekker (Saint)

"Fang: "Have you guys been playing in the toxic waste again? Been bitten by a radioactive spider? Struck by lightning? Drink a super-soldier serum?"


"
— James Patterson (The Final Warning)

"Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.

"
— E.B. White

"Spiders so large they appear to be wearing the pelts of small mammals."
— Dave Barry

"Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)

"There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under you foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal guy like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be where you get to the other place."
— Robert Penn Warren

"...one of the secret masters of
the world: a librarian. They
control information. Don't ever p**s one off. _The Callahan Touch_
"
— Spider Robinson

"The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies."
— Daniel Quinn

"How bitterly glad I am to see you. You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it won't be for long. What do you know about the sea? Nothing. What do I know about the sea? Nothing. Without a driver this bus is lost. Our lives are over. Come aboard if your destination is oblivion-- It should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat, if you want. But it's a sad view. Oh enough of this disembling. Let me say plainly: I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Not the spiders, please."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"Then you'll feel your cheek scratched...
A little kiss, like a crazy spider,
Will run round your neck...

And you'll say to me : "Find it !" bending your head
- And we'll take a long time to find that creature
- Which travels a lot...
"
— Arthur Rimbaud

"Take your protein pills and put your helmet on... Check ignition and may God's love be with you..."
— David Bowie (Bowie, David: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - Off the Record)

"I take my hat off to you-or I would, if I were not afraid of showering you with spiders."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew…."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"Just like a spider with a line of silk! Did you ever see them throw themselves out into space to weave? They're taking a chance, every single time. They got to do it or else they'd never create anything. But I bet it don't feel good, even to a spider."
— Olivia Goldsmith

"The real magic - the magic we'd lived with all our lives, my mother's magic of charms and cantrips, of salt by the door and a red silk sachet to placate the little gods - had turned sour on us that summer, somehow, like a spider that turns from good luck to bad at the stroke of midnight, spinning its web to catch our dreams. And for every little spell of charm, for every card dealt and every rune cast and every sign scratched against a doorway to divert the path of malchance, the wind just blew a little harder, tugging at our clothes, sniffing at us like a hungry dog, moving us here and moving us there."
— Joanne Harris (The Lollipop Shoes)

"...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?"
— Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum: A Novel)

"My daughter told me she wasn't afraid of spider but that she was afraid of my smoking. She said that she was afraid of my dying. So i went downstairs, picked up a pair of pliers and a blowtorch and showed her what real fear was."
— Robert Clark

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself...and spiders."
— unknown (seen on a tee-shirt)

"Sexual intercourse vests no property rights."
— Spider Robinson (Callahan's Secret)

"When Frank Sinatra sings Stormy Weather, the flies and the spiders get along together. "
— Cake

"She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life.""
— Robert Goolrick

"In my opinion, the only good spider is a dead spider, and women's rights aren't worth dick if they mean I can't ask a man to do my bug squashing."
— Janet Evanovich (One for the Money)

"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught."
— Honoré de Balzac

"I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a
bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely
than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south
wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new
house."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Nothing like a spider in the mouth to get you thinking.
"
— Steve Aylett (The Inflatable Volunteer)

"...'One fast more or I'm gone', I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline you take, or Peyote goop up with-- That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bent back mudman monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere, the feeling of standing ankledeep in hot boiled pork blood, ugh, of being up to your waist in a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater not a trace of suds left in it--The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so hagged and awful with sorrow you can't even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything: it's like William Seward Burroughs' 'Stranger' suddenly appearing in your place in the mirror- Enough! 'One fast move or I'm gone' so I jump up, do my headstand first to pump blood back into the hairy brain, take a shower in the hall, new T-shirt and socks and underwear, pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run out throwing the key on the desk and hit the cold street...I've got to escape or die..."
— Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)

""He lives in kind of a different world from the rest of us. You know? The kind of world where electricity is a lot of invisible spiders. The kind of world where there's organ music that gets louder when he eats refined sugar." "
— M. T. Anderson

"They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs."
— Susan Hill

"Good evening charlie, yes I know you rise, two lean grey spiders drifting through your eyes."
— James Wright

"A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after."
— Joanne Harris (Chocolat)

"'Course they wouldn't have all the details, like whether or not they played in squares of sunlight on their walls, if they wore spiders on their hats, if they ate hamburger every other day, if they had ever made love in a yellow canola field tenderly or passionately or awkwardly. If they preferred dresses or pants, if they shaved their legs or didn't, or if they preferred red peppers to green. Stuff was happening. Even in Half-a-Life. Little things, but it all added up to something big. To our lives. It was happening all along. These were our lives. This was it. My mom was hanging on to the lives, the recorded lives, of these women. We might escape, but what if we didn't? What if we lived in Half-a-Life all our lives, poor, lonely, proud, happy? If we did, we did. These were our lives. If we couldn't escape them, we'd have to live them."
— Miriam Toews (Summer of My Amazing Luck: A Novel)

"You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.

"
— E B White

"The Blue Jay's Lament --

Spiders and sowbugs and beetles and crickets,
Slugs from the roses and ticks from the thickets,
Grasshoppers, snails, and a quail's egg or two--
All to be regurgitated for you.
Lullaby, lullaby, swindles and schemes,
Flying's not near as much fun as it seems."
— Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)

"Even a spider would get caught up in this web of lies that you spun on me everyday."
— The Audition

"Nobody goes "AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!" when they sing it. Maybe because it puts the life adventure in such clear and simple terms. The small creature is alive and looks for adventure. Here's the drainpipe--a long tunnel going up toward some light. The spider doesn't even think about it--just goes. Disaster befalls it--rain, flood, powerful foces. And the spider is knocked down and out beyond where it started. Does the spider say, "To hell with that"? No. Sun comes out--clears things up--dries off the spider. And the small creature goes over to the drainpipe and looks up and thinks it really wants to know what is up there."
— Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)

"Don't let your life's income determine your life's outcome"
— The Pink Spiders

"If you wish to live and thrive, let a spider run alive. "
— old English nursery rhyme

"The pianokeys are black and white
but they sound like a million colors in your mind

- From "Spiders web""
— Maria Cristina Mena

"Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. "
— Pablo Picasso