"He muttered to himself, as did the first seaman whom I saw in the hold, some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue, and although the speaker was close at my elbow, yet his voice seemed to reach my ears from the distance of a mile. The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries."
The Nightingale and the Rose (1888) Oscar Wilde
"'Death is a great price to pay for a red rose,' cried the Nightingale, 'and Life is very dear to all. It is pleasant to sit in the green wood, and to watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent of the hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?' "
Knock (1948) Frederic Brown
"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...' Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn't in the two sentences at all; it's in the ellipsis, the implication."
Flowers for Algernon (1958) Daniel Keyes
"I guess the same thing is or will soon be happening to me. Now that it's definite, I don't want it to happen. I put Algernon's body in a cheese box and buried him in the back yard. I cried."
