So never give in,” continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter experience, it resisted her. Presently the waitress entered and gave her a letter from Margaret. Another note, addressed to Leonard, was inside. They read them, listening to the murmurings of the river.

He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.

I heard the Master preach.
“Don’t be chained to love and suffering. Instead, cut the ties of love and you will rejoice in your heart.” So he said in a loud voice.<p>The Master is quite a fool.
He does not know: true it hurts to be tied with love, but it will hurt more to cut the ties of love, it will hurt more than even death.
In the tight binding of love’s bonds lies their unbinding.<p>Thus great liberation is to be had in the bonds themselves.
My love, I was afraid the rope of your love might be weak so I doubled the strands of my love for you.

She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl.

From her bag, she removes the cord of rope with a noose on one end. She throws it up over the lowest-hanging branch, a good four meters above ground — about thirteen feet high. It takes her three tries to get the noose end over the branch. Then she raises up the other side of the rope as the noose side lowers down to her. Once she has it in her hand, she slides the straight end of the rope through the noose. Then she pulls down on the straight end slowly, careful to avoid any snags, as the noose end slowly rises again. On the branch, the two sides come together in a knot.

The ties that bind us to life are tougher than you imagine, or than any one can who has not felt how roughly they may be pulled without breaking.

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

The Hittite woman would not give up. Each time Salu came, she clutched desperately at the threads of his life as if at a garment she could pull him by. (p 171)

The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose.

In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.
All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone — had only to be touched once to adhere to what touched her.

She took the story in like some strange, spiked gift, too fragile to drop, too painful to hold.

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

"Love..." she repeated slowly, in a musing voice, and suddenly, while disentangling the lace, she added: "The reason I dislike this word because it means such a great deal to me, far more than you can understand."

...her [Albertine's] intense and velvety gaze fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin.