But I forgot that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale, and your looks remind me to proceed.
-Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein

More transparent
Than this water dropping
Through the vine’s twined fingers
My thought stretches a bridge
from yourself to yourself
Look at you
Truer than the body you inhabit
Fixed at the center of my mind
You were born to live on an island
-Octavio Paz, from Madrigal

This evening
The river is a beautiful idle woman.
The day’s August burn-out
has distilled a heady sundowner.
She lies back, bored and tipsy.
-Ted Hughes, from Low Water

Downwards, directed by a tunneled pass, as through a leveled telescope, I caught sight of a far-off, soft, azure world. I hardly knew it, though I came from it. -Melville, from The Piazza

A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.
-Seamus Heaney, from Twice Shy

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
-Seamus Heaney, Follower

Nay, it was no democracy at all, but a permanent Riotocracy, which gloried in having no law but lawlessness.
-Melville, from Great Short Works

Such was the outpouring of inventions in the late nineteenth century that in 1899 Charles Duell resigned as head of the Patent Office, declaring that “everything that can be invented has been invented.”
-Bill Bryson, Made In America

It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Scarlet Letter

Of course.
I was going to, you know.
Or maybe you didn’t.
Already my mouth
gone soft when you
kissed me goodnight
and let me go.
It would’ve been easy.
I could’ve claimed
I was afraid of the dark.
I am, you know.
Afraid I mean.
-Sandra Cisneros, from Why I Didn’t