At one point in the essay, she remarks that she cannot remember any instance in the course of her reading where two women were depicted as friends until Jane Austen's day, which is to say, until female authors did so. Had she completely forgotten Hermia and Helena, Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Hero, Desdemona and Emilia, Hermione and Paulina? I couldn't believe that. Woolf read Shakespeare obsessively throughout her life and alluded to his plays throughout her novels. Were we meant to contradict here again? To wave our arms and say, "Well, what about Shakespeare?" And if she considered the depiction of female friendships characteristic of a woman's authorship, then Shakespeare . . . 

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies (ellipses in original)

They knew it was an illusion, but they loved the illusion. It was a beautiful illusion. Plus, the illusion made good economic sense.

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies

Jed looked to the heavens, to the indifferent constellations.

—Michel Houellenbecq, The Map and the Territory

"The kind of people I know now don't have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. Some of them can even move their ears. They're wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and look for chances."

—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

 After they left, I lay on Francis's couch, smoking his cigarettes and drinking his Scotch, and watched "Jeopardy." One of the contestants was from San Gilberto, which is really close to where I grew up, only five or six miles away. All those suburbs tend to run into one another out there, so you can't always tell where one ends and the next begins.

After that came a made-for-television movie. It was about the threat of the earth colliding with another planet and how all the scientists in the world united to avert the catastrophe. A hack astronomer, who is constantly on talk shows and whose name you would probably recognize, played himself in a cameo role.

For some reason, I felt uneasy about watching the news alone when it came on at eleven, so I turned to PBS and watched something called "History of Metallurgy." It was actually quite interesting, but I was tired and a bit drunk, and I fell asleep before it ended.

—Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Oh, the world was full in those days; it seemed so much more alive than these quiet times when a new thing could take many lifetimes to finish its long birth labors and the world stay the same for generations. In those days a thousand things began and ended in a single lifetime, great forces clashed and were swallowed up in other forces riding over them. It was like some monstrous race between destruction and perfection; as soon as some piece of the world was conquered, after vast effort by millions, as when they build Road, the conquest would turn on the conquerors, as Road killed thousands in their cars; and in the same way, the mechanical dreams the angels made with great labor and inconceivable ingenuity, dreams broadcast on the air like milkweed seeds, all day long, passing invisibly through the air, through walls, through stone walls, through the very bodies of the angels themselves as they sat to await them, and appearing then before every angel simultaneously to warn or to instruct, one dream dreamed by all so that all could act in concert, until it was discovered that the dreams passing through their bodies were poisonous to them somehow, don't ask me how, and millions were sickening and dying young and unable to bear children, but unable to stop the dreaming even when the dreams themselves warned them that the dreams were poisoning them, unable or afraid to wake and find themselves alone, until the Long League awakened the women and the women ceased to dream: and all this happening in one man's lifetime.

And it all went faster as the Storm came on, that is the Storm coming on was the race drawing to its end; the solutions grew stranger and more desperate, and the disasters greater, and in the teeth of them the angels dreamed their wildest dreams, that we would live forever or nearly, that we would leave the earth, the spoiled earth, entirely and float in cities suspended between the earth and the moon forever, a dream they could not achieve because of the Wars starting and the millions of them falling out in a million different ways and all at each other's throats. And the Long League growing secretly everywhere as the desperate solutions fell to ruins or exploded in the faces of their makers, the Long League in secret struggle with the angels, who hardly knew of its existence in their midst till the League was the only power left when the Law and the Gummint had exhausted themselves with the Wars and in the struggle to keep the world man's; and for that matter the truthful speakers beginning the speech over the thousand phones of the Co-op Great Belaire; and while the million lights were going out, and the mechanical dreams fading and leaving the angels alone in the terrible dark, the Planters, thousand-armed and -eyed and wiser than any human being, searched other skies and suns at the angel's bidding, and brought home the trees of bread and who knows what else now lost; and nobody able to comprehend everything going on all at once, and no wonder either; and then the Storm, which anybody could have seen, and it all began to stop, and kept stopping till the old woodlands which they had never been in before and looking around in wonder at the old world as though it were as strange as their dreams had truly been.

Blink said: "It was as though a great sphere of many-colored glass had been floated above the world by the unimaginable effort and power of the angels, so beautiful and strange and so needful of service to keep afloat that for them there was nothing else, and the world was forgotten by them as they watched it float. Now the sphere is gone, smashed in the Storm, and we are left with the old world as it always was, save for a few wounds that can never be healed. But littered all around this old ordinary world, scattered through the years by that smashing, lost in the strangest places and put to the oddest uses, are bits and pieces of that great sphere; bits to hold up to the sun and look through and marvel at—but which can never be put back together again."

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

One thing about Leaf cord, they're very down to earth, but if the occasion comes up, they'll rise to it.

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hootings of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lord's clarions rested! No wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock,—to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds,—think of it! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he become unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Foolish soul! What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.

—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

This love between man and dog is the heart of fox-hunting, and one of the reasons that hunting with hounds has been so often on the tip of the poet's tongue, and so often exalted in paint or marble or music. It is a refreshing love, based in realistic perceptions and mutual utility, and culminating in a common triumph. The love that people feel for their pets may be real, but it is seldom realistic. It rarely occurs to the suburban dog-lover that the ease with which his pet's affection is purchased is a sign of its moral worthlessness. Fido's wagging tail is misread as an endorsement, a sign that Fido has peered into his provider's heart and been moved by the spectacle of human kindness. The daily bowl of gravy-smeared chunks is a reward for moral insight. As for the creatures whose remnants lie in the bowl, the dog-lover has no qualms about their slaughter, so long as he does not witness it. For is it not obvious that they died to feed a moral being, a creature like you or me, whose wisdom, rationality and goodness of heart are all definitively proven by his choice of master?

No such sentiments pollute the heart of the huntsman. His hounds still live in their savage state, relieved of that constant and inachievable demand to mimic the manners of a moral being, which troubles the life of an incarcerated pet. They sleep in a pack in dog-scented kennels, hunt in a pack with their powers supremely stretched; they eat raw flesh, and not too much of it; they drink the brackish water of mud-stopped ditches; and the price of every slackness is the rough end of the tongue. Once trained to hunt they can never be subdued to a household regime, and can expect nothing when their hunting strength is gone besides a shot in the head, often administered by the very man whose love is all to them. But their time on earth is a happy one; everything they do is rooted in their nature, and even the crowning gift of human love comes in the guise of species-life: for the huntsman is leader of the pack, first among the band of canine warriors. His authority is not that mysterious, guilt-ridden thing that appears to the pet in the down-turned milky eyes of his crooning captor, but the glad imperative of the species, miraculously incarnate in human form.

—Roger Scruton, On Hunting

It was early and the restaurant was empty save for him. He sipped the wine and when the steak came he cut into it and chewed slowly and thought about his life.

—Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

I am there now, as I write; I fancy that I can see the downs, the hits, the plain, and the river-bed — that torrent pathway of desolation, with its distant roar of waters. Oh, wonderful! wonderful! so lonely and so solemn, with the sad grey clouds above, and no sound save a lost lamb bleating upon the mountain side, as though its little heart were breaking. Then there comes some lean and withered old ewe, with deep gruff voice and unlovely aspect, trotting back from the seductive pasture; now she examines this gully, and now that, and now she stands listening with uplifted head, that she may hear the distant wailing and obey it. Aha! they see, and rush towards each other. Alas! they are both mistaken; the ewe is not the lamb's ewe, they are neither kin nor kind to one another, and part in coldness. Each must cry louder, and wander farther yet; may luck be with them both that they may find their own at nightfall. But this is mere dreaming, and I must proceed.

—Samuel Butler, Erewhon

The law of contradiction is not to be taken as an axiom prior to or independent of God. The law is God thinking.

—Gordon Clark, Logic

What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe! Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

A periodical gets its weekly wad of books and sends off a dozen of them to X, the hack-reviewer, who has a wife and family and has got to earn his guinea, not to mention the half-crown per vol. which he gets by selling his review copies. There are two reasons why it is totally impossible for X to tell the truth about the books he gets. To begin with, the chances are that eleven out of the twelve books will fail to rouse in him the faintest spark of interest. They are not more than ordinarily bad, they are merely neutral, lifeless and pointless. If he were not paid to do so he would never read a line of any of them, and in nearly every case the only truthful review he could write would be: "This book inspires in me no thoughts whatever." But will anyone pay you to write that kind of thing? Obviously not. As a start, therefore, X is in the false position of having to manufacture, say, three hundred words about a book which means nothing to him whatever. Usually he does it by giving a brief resumé of the plot (incidentally betraying to the author the fact that he hasn't read the book) and handing out a few compliments which for all their fulsomeness are about as valuable as the smile of a prostitute.

—George Orwell, "In Defence of the Novel", in Complete Essays

I was just nineteen years old then, and so was the century.

—Benvenuto Cellini, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini

We reached the camping-place in the outer wild.

—Benvenuto Cellini, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini

The aroma of old Burgundy is the slowly rotting leaf-mould on a grave: a soft, sweet, musky fermentation, last breath of life from the sinner who lies decomposing below.

—Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine

When she came out it was raining. The night itself wanted to touch her.

—Isak Dinesen, "The Deluge at Norderny" from Seven Gothic Tales

For the rest, after the first six months, she grew like a larch, and could walk and talk too, in her own way, before the heath blossomed a second time over Mrs. Linton's dust.

—Emily Brontë;, Wuthering Heights