We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air; We dug a spring in infancy Of water pure and fair; We sowed in youth a mustard seed, We cut an almond rod; We are now grown up to riper ageö Are they withered in the sod?

-Bronte«  , Charlotte
  'We Wove a Web in Childhood'.

Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave When they think that their children are na|«ve.

-Nash, (Frederic) Ogden
  The Face Is Familiar,'Baby, What Makes the Sky Blue'.

A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.

-Pagels, Heinz R(udolf)
  The Dreams of Reason.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!

-Scott, Sir Walter
  Marmion, canto 6, stanza17.

She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces through the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She looked down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror cracked from side to side; 'The curse is come upon me', cried The Lady of Shalott.

-Tennyson
  Poems,'The Lady of Shalott' (revised1842), pt.3, l.109^17.