Bowstring Quotes

There is a beautiful tale among the Australian aborigines which says that the bow and arrow were not man's invention, but an ancestor God turned himself into a bow and his wife became the bowstring, for she constantly has her hands around his neck, as the bowstring embraces the bow. So the couple came down to earth and appeared to a man, revealing themselves as bow and bowstring, and from that the man understood how to construct a bow. The bow ancestor and his wife then disappeared again into a hole in the earth. So man, like an ape, only copied, but did not invent, the bow and arrow. And so the smiths originally, or so it seems from Eliade's rather plausible argument, did not feel that they had invented metallurgy; rather, they learned how to transform metals on the basis of understanding how God made the world. (Marie-Louise von Franz)

And the eyes of all look upward seeing sign-word drawing nigh, The stony wings of Egypt coming back across the sky;We hear the clinking tamborine of Miriam anew; We believe in every miracle since Lindbergh flew the blue - The wonder of the long draw when the bowstring is a thread - The beauty of a courage that can raise the wings of lead.

Nathalia Crane

There shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the bowstring.

Homer