Herman Melville
- from "Moby Dick"
All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
Cormac McCarthy
- from "Blood Meridian"
The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
- from Ozymandias
And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Henry David Thoreau
- Closing lines of "Walden"
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
