'the fearful pageantry'

The open hollow between the ridges was the great valley of the shadow of death, and when the smoke drifted up and spun away into misty fragments it was as if a curtain had gone up to reveal the stage of some terrible unimaginable theater. The Federal soldiers on the eastern ridge looked west; they were veterans and they had been in many battles, but what they saw now took their breath away. Some of them had seventy-five years yet to live and some of them had no more than ten minutes, but until they died they remembered the scene that now presented itself. There it was, for the last time in this war, perhaps for the last time anywhere, the fearful pageantry and color of war in the old style, beautiful and majestic and hideous; fighting men lined up in double and triple ranks, a solid mile from flank to flank, slashed red flags overhead, sunlight glinting off polished musket barrels—the flower of Lee's army coming forward, unhurried ...

—Bruce Catton, Gettysburg: The Final Fury (1974)

'play the men into their last great fight'

Lee had come over the Chambersburg road from the west, riding up the long slope of South Mountain and then coming down to the clamorous plain with its great streaked blanket of battle smoke hiding the future and all its chances. Meade had come up the Emmitsburg road from the south to see the battle his advance guard had prepared for him, and they may have told him how the first Federal infantry, the Iron Brigade (wrecked now almost beyond repair), had left the road just below Gettysburg to go cross-lots over to Seminary Ridge, where the Yankee cavalry was trying to hold off the Confederate infantry. The Federal commander had sent the fife and drum corps to the head of the column to play the men into their last great fight, and it played "The Campbells Are Coming," the fifes shrilling out above the hard clatter of musket fire, the rattle of drums jarred off balance by the heavy concussion of artillery fire. ... There had been hard fighting that day of July 1, and harder fighting on July 2, and now it was July 3 and time for this bloody business to come to its climax.

—Bruce Catton, Gettysburg: The Final Fury (1974)

'must you chase your destiny like a harpoonist?'

She left him on the desk and walked out onto a small wooden balcony. There she adopted a rentier's stance—arms spread, hands on the rail. She would track down an interesting job, she vowed. She would study Hesse and Mann. She would refuse to make a nightly fourth at bridge, and to pay calls on local drips. This austerity would clear her decks for action. Still she wondered: did the present deliver up the future, or must you chase your destiny like a harpoonist?

—Edith Pearlman, "Hanging Fire," Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (2011) (originally published in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring, 1977)

'people are generally quite as vain ... of their deficiencies'

It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies, than of their available gifts; as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability, so to speak, of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose. She regarded it as an hereditary trait; and so, perhaps, it was, but, unfortunately, a morbid one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the surface of society.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

'sticking a pin through a butterfly'

When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The Author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with a moral, as with an iron rod—or rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly—thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

'a red thread'

There is a curious custom in the British Navy: all the cordage of the Royal Fleet, whether heavy or light, is twisted so that a red thread runs through whole ropes, by which even the smallest piece can be recognized as Crown property.

In the same way a thread of love and deep attachment seems to run through Ottilie's diary, connecting everything she writes, and giving it a distinctive character. Because of this thread, the young girl's comments, observations and quotations bear a special mark, and convey a particular meaning. Each passage we have selected and recorded is definite proof of this.

—Goethe, Elective Affinities (1809) (trans. Elizabeth Mayer & Louise Bogan 1963)

'planning to be such an important finger'

"Well," Amory considered, "I'm not sure that the war itself had any great effect on you or me—but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation."

Tom looked up in surprise.

"Yes it did," insisted Amory. "I'm not sure it didn't kill it out of the whole world. Oh Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader—and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn't be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger—"

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

'the broad path of honesty'

They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular, admired and never in trouble. He dressed well, was particularly neat in appearance and derived his name from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic, parted in the middle and slicked back as the current fashion dictated.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

'leaves and sky on opening my eyes'

On his way to work each morning, Marcovaldo walked beneath the green foliage of a square with trees, a bit of public garden, isolated in the junction of four streets. He ... listened to the racket of the sparrows, tone-deaf, invisible on the branches. To him they seemed nightingales, and he said to himself: "Oh, if I could wake just once at the twitter of birds and not at the sound of the alarm and the crying of little Paolino and the yelling of my wife, Domitilla!" or else: "Oh, if I could sleep here, alone, in the midst of this cool green shade and not in my cramped, hot room; here amid the silence, not amid the snoring and sleep-talking of my whole family and the racing of trams down below in the street; here in the natural darkness of the night, not in the artificial darkness of closed blinds, streaked by the glare of headlights; oh, if I could see leaves and sky on opening my eyes!" With these thoughts every day Marcovaldo began his eight daily hours—plus overtime—as an unskilled laborer.

—Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo, or The seasons in the city (1963; trans. William Weaver 1983)

...talked itself to the edge of the abyss

And I think we also can appreciate the simple pathos of Heidegger's disenchantment with philosophy. At times, of course, it is little more than the protest of a weary man, perhaps aware of his own moral and intellectual failures, imploring the voices of philosophy and ideology to cease their babbling. Western humanity has talked its way right to the edge of the abyss - so, please, be silent now. Wait. Listen. Let being speak, let the world be a world again, let the divine show itself to us if it will. But stop talking for a while.

—David Bentley Hart, "A Philosopher in the Twilight" (February 2011)