Four passages I read this morning. Meanwhile the snow fell.

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?

from A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare's mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women.

from Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionecso (trans. by Derek Prouse)

Berenger (surfeited and pretty weary): How do I know, then? Perhaps [the rhinoceros has] been hiding under a stone? . . . Or maybe it's been nesting on some withered branch?

from Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy by Sun Ra

Proper evaluation of words and letters in their phonetic and associated sense can bring the peoples of the earth into the clear light of pure Cosmic Wisdom.