A loved one handed me,
a fragrant piece of mud, on the beach.
Drunk from the perfume and the scent,
I queried if it were musk or amber.

'I am a humble lump of clay; but
for long in the company of a rose!'
It said,' It is the rose you smell.
I am still the clay, my friend.'
Sadi

I sat down by her and made a few specifications about
the moral surface of nature as set forth by the landscape
and the contiguous perspective. That evening was surely a
case in point. The moon was attending to business in the
section of the sky where it belonged, and the trees was
making shadows on the ground according to science and
nature, and there was a kind of conspicuous hullaballo
going on in the bushes between the bullbats and the orioles
and the jack-rabbits and other feathered insects of the
forest. And the wind out of the mountains was singing like
a jew's harp in the pile of old tomato cans by the railroad
tracks. I felt a kind of sensation in my left side - something
like dough rising in a crock by the fire. Mrs Jessup had moved
up closer.
William Sidney Porter Telemachus, Friend(O Henry)

April breeze; spends its time in airy sport, and
has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant
in its best of moods, and chills oftener than carresses
you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of
which misdemenaors, it will sometime, of its own vague
purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful
tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be
gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy
pleasure at your heart.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Ach, heute das fuehlte ich, wuerde
das Bild der arabischen Prinzessin nicht mehr
genuegen, mich gegen Welt und Hoelle zu feien und
zum Ritter und Kreuzfahrer zu machen, es wuerde
heute anderer, staerkerer Zauber beduerfen.
Hermann Hesse

And at dawn, as the rooster crew,
Those who stood before the tavern shouted,
"Open then the door!"
You know how little while we have to stay,
and, once departed, may return no more.
Omar Khayyam

She seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to him that he lost all hope, even the faintest. But, by thus renouncing her, he made her ascend to extraordinary heights. She transcended, in his eyes, those sensous attributes which were forever out of his reach; and in his heart she rose forever, soaring away from him like a winged apotheosis. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated for their rarity, and whose loss would afflict more than their fulfillment rejoices.
Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary Translator: Paul de Man

Elle lui parut donc si verteuse et inaccessible, que toute esperance, meme la plus vague, l'abandonna. Mais, par ce renoncement, il la placait en des conditions extraordinaire. Elle se degagea, pour lui, des qualites charnelles dont il n'avait rien a obtenir; et elle alla, dans son coeur, montant tojours et s'en detachant, a la maniere magnifique d'une apotheose qui s'envole. C'etait une de ces sentiments pour qui n'embarrassent pas l'exercise de la vie, que l'on cultive parce qu'ils sont rares, et dont la perte affligerait plus que la possession n'est rejouissante. Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

"Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor."

John Cheever, O City of Broken Dreams

She turned to walk back the way she'd come. It wouldn't be a shock, nor even a surprise. He expected no more of her than what she'd given him, and she would choose her moment to say that she must go. He would understand; she would not have to tell him. The best that love could do was not enough, and he would know that also.

William Trevor, The Room