I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life [that] I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof. (Annie Dillard, An American Childhood)

The radiators put out lots of heat, too much, in fact, and old-fashioned sounds and smells came with it, exhalations of the matter that composes our own mortality, and reminiscent of the intimate gases we all diffuse. (Saul Bellow)

Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. (Annie Dillard)

Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. (John Kennedy)

Unprovided with original learning, uninformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved— to write a book. (Edward Gibbon in Memoirs of My Life)

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing. (Goethe)

Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. (Truman Capote, In Cold Blood)

He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep himself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep himself from knitting. (P.G. Wodehouse, Cocktail Time)

Men always want to be a woman's first love; women want to be a man's last romance. (Oscar Wilde)

George was coming down in the telemark position, kneeling, one leg forward and bent, the other trailing, his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow, and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light all in a cloud of snow. (Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time)

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. (Abraham Lincoln, "The Gettysburg Address")