In "A Guest's Impression of New England," William Faulkner concluded:

To stand out against that environment which has done its worst to him, and failed, leaving him not only superior to it but its master, too. He quits it occasionally of course, but he takes it with him, too. You will find him in the Middle West, you will find him in Burbank and Glendale and Santa Monica in sunglasses and straw sandals and his shirt-tail outside his pants. But open the aloha bed-jacket and scratch him a little and you will find the thin soil and the rocks and the long snow and the man who had not at all been driven from his birthplace because it had beaten him at last, but who had left it because he himself was the victor and the spirit was gone with his cooling and slowing blood, and now is simply using that never-never land of mystics and astrologers and fire-worshippers and raw-carrot fiends as a hobby for his declining years.

In his translated novel "Four Hands," Paco Ignacio Taibo II wrote:

"Comrade Vasilev, where were you born?"

"I am not authorized to disclose that information. Unless you can show me the card of Comrade Chervenkov, secretary general, the card of the Bulgarian Workers's Party, I cannot offer that information."

"Why can't you offer that information?"

"When did you join the party?"

"That is not relevant, we are talking about you, Vasilev, not me."

"When did you join the party? And I warn you that if I don't get an answer, this interrogation is over."

"Okay, 1945. Why?"

"Because I joined in 1926, which gives me the absolute right to demand, Comrade Interrogator, that you not address me familiarly."

"Agreed, Comrade Vasilev, sir. When and where were you born, sir?"

"In 1939, Stalin asked me personally in Moscow please not to divulge that information to anyone. Do you remember the story of the Man in the Iron Mask? Well then, for the same reasons, Stalin asked me earnestly not to speak of this. If you doubt me, ask him."

"Vasilev, you were not in Moscow in 1939."

"I don't see how you can say such a foolish thing, you're the one who was not in Moscow then. I am absolutely positive we did not see each other in those days."

In "The Tomorrow-Tamer", Margaret Laurence ended:

"The fish is netted and eaten; the antelope is hunted and fed upon; the python is slain and cast into the cooking-pot. But--oh, my children, my sons--a man consumed by the gods lives forever."

In William Shakespeare's "The Tempest":

PROSPERO.
You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.--Sir, I am vex'd:
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled.
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity.
If you be pleas'd, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.

FERDINAND, MIRANDA.
We wish your peace.

In "The Gulag Archipelago", Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn observed:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"